Transposition
by Invaderk
Summary: Tony/Pepper. After a disturbance that leaves both Tony and Pepper injured and more vulnerable than ever, the two discover that there is a lot more to their strained relationship than banter, and that they've got some obstacles to climb along the way.
1. Intervention

A/n: After working out a good story-line, I finally decided that it was time to write my first multi-chapter Iron Man story! There's not too much to say here, other than it's obviously a work in progress, and I'm up for criticism if you give it. This story is about 95 movieverse, with little hints of the comic book verse added in for flavor here and there, and some deviations of my own.

This story takes place a few years after the end of the first film, at which point we can assume Tony and Iron Man are fairly well-known within the super hero scene, although he's apparently covered up his identity from the public.

Anyway, though I've re-written this several times, I finally decided to stick with present tense-it'll be a challenge for me, but I'm hoping it comes out right! I just ask for patience while I try to hammer the details of this present tense stuff out.

Disclaimer: I own nothing.

Happy Reading!

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**Transposition**

ooo

_Transposition (Trans-po-SI-tion): noun. 1. A reversal or alteration of the positions or order in which things stand. 2. A placing of something in a different setting, or its recasting in a different language, style, or medium. 3. A transfer of a term from one side of an equation to another, reversing the sign._

ooo

_I. Intervention_

Pepper Potts and Tony Stark have long since settled into the rhythm of the tedious car ride. She remembers almost everything from the day—or at least how it begins with that trip, right down to the engine of the sleek black SUV humming under her feet and the distant sigh in Tony's voice when he asks "how the hell close are we?" only an hour into the ride.

The two sit adjacent and unspeaking, the silence broken only by Tony's occasional sigh as he stares out into the busy city life. Pepper props herself against the leather seat with her Blackberry perched precariously on one knee, her manicured fingers typing out a very terse message to the governor—one stating that no, Tony Stark was in no way involved in the previous day's Orlando explosion (he had been, of course, but nobody needed to know that). Tony himself has lapsed into a thoughtful silence in the last hour of travel, speaking only in monosyllables or when he sees a particularly voluptuous runner on the sidewalk. In other words, as ordinary as any other five-hour trip the pair has undergone together.

Pepper sighs when the beep in her phone reminds her just how tight her schedule is. When she leans forward, though, and asks Happy just how long until they arrive, he only shrugs and says that as far as he knows, they'll get there in time for coffee and biscotti before the conference. Tony makes an interested grunt at the word "biscotti" and tunes into the conversation, Pepper rolls her eyes at the billionaire. How typical, she thinks. The ever one-track mind is always conflicted with ADD, as much as a paradox as it seems. Tony Stark can altogether be a bit of a paradox.

Then his hand is on her shoulder in a gesture that he must think is comforting, even though she has shrugged off the same hand on the same shoulder maybe a thousand times in their years as employee and employer. Similarly, now she only feels more nauseated. Pepper has never been one for long car rides, or letting Tony touch her in any way—for different reasons, one having to do with throwing up her dinner and the other having to do with her frazzled nerves in general—and so far this ride has included both. But her insistences bounce off his smirking face as always, and he continues to talk to her as if she hasn't just slapped his hand away.

Tony agrees with Happy, to which Pepper can only reply that this meeting has been reschedules not five but _ten_ times, and that missing it again will surely end the partnership that Stark Industries has invested millions of dollars in with the Malcolm Metal company.

Tony gives a nonchalant shrug and responds, "Not to worry, Miss Potts. The worst case scenario is that we hit some traffic and I have to fly there." He pats a little too affectionately the briefcase that sits on his lap. Pepper cringes, knowing all too well just how much he'd love to show up at the meeting in his Iron Man suit.

As much as Pepper is wondering how he's managed to fit that entire hunk-of-metal contraption suit in that little briefcase, she's too worried about the meeting to ask. Instead, she cocks her head towards her boss and frowns at his handsomely complacent features.

"I don't think you understand how important this is," she states, tearing her eyes from the lock of hair that falls in just the perfect spot over his eyebrow. "They needed us to travel ten hours to talk face-to-face about the Malcolm-Stark Deal. We couldn't even _fly_ there, their security is so sound."

"Paranoia everywhere I turn," he mutters.

Tony swings his legs towards her to get a better look at her stoic expression, one hand reaching out and patting hers where it sits on the knee unoccupied by her phone. Her mouth twitches, her leg moves away from his hand.

"We'll get there, don't worry," he assures her with a confident smile, and turns back to the tinted window to admire a group of female shoppers as they pass, arms laden with shopping bags from the surrounding towers. Pepper glances at them as well and wonders what she'd be doing right now if she hadn't been in the car for the last five hours—maybe shopping, or getting that facial she'd been waiting for. More likely finishing some overdue paperwork.

She sighs, half assured by his confidence and Happy's driving but all too aware that Tony is just as capable of putting on a façade as she is when confronted with business issues. But even though Tony is as unreliable as her broken alarm clock, she realizes that he does indeed have a hidden point: they'll get there eventually, and he _can_ fly if they really—

_Boom._

Happy slams on the brakes as the cars in front of him screech almost simultaneously to a halt, sending Pepper flying forward so hard against her seatbelt that she can already feel the bruise beginning to form under her white blouse. She gives a shout at the sudden halt and feels her blackberry fly off her knee and hit the seat in front of her, hears Tony give a surprised half-yelp from beside her in the back seat. More screeching, cars swerving to avoid one another, some colliding. It's a good thing Happy's a good driver, she thinks.

_Boom_.

The noise is louder this time, coupled with the screams of the civilians outside. Happy shuts off the car, swearing. In the five seconds that follow the first boom, Tony unbuckles his seatbelt and climbs over the passenger seat to get a better look at what is going on.

"What the _hell_, Hap?" he exclaims. "Are you all right, or do I have to give you mouth-to-mouth?"

"No, I'm fine, but thanks for the offer."

As Happy and Tony begin to investigate the sudden occurrence, Pepper presses her hands against the window glass and peers out into unfolding chaos. It's like in the movies, she observes, where women are screaming and running, shopping bags in one hand and crying children streaming from the other, people are climbing from their cars to get a better look down the traffic-packed street. Something's happening. Something _bad._

Yes, a part of her brain _does_ register that something insane is going on just outside the safety-glass window, and yet the only thing she can think as she sits there with her mouth hanging open in horror is '_We're going to be late._'

"Tony—" Pepper tears her eyes from the people running around outside the car and turns back to Happy and Tony, who are trying to figure out what exactly has just happened.

"—Well it looks like a crash, no less than ten cars," Happy observes in a low tone, shooting his friend a sidelong glance.

"Here, open the sunroof."

Tony clambers to his feet on the passenger seat and sticks his entire top half out of the car's sunroof. Pepper after a moment realizes that she's staring and gives her head a hard shake to get her mesmerized self back on track. The gears in her well-trained mind have begun to turn at a million miles a minute, planning out everything from the direct course of action to where she can get some caffeine after it's all said a done. First task: inform the businessmen that they've hit traffic, and that they'll be just a few minutes late. Maybe after she can get Tony to suit up and fly off to the meeting on his own, just to save time, but first she knows she needs to take care of the businessmen themselves. A cold sweat that has nothing to do with the air conditioning blasting throughout the car begins to percolate on the back of her neck, unaided by the fact that her blackberry has skittered across the floor and disappeared beneath the seat.

Sighing at the indignity of it all and more than a little glad that Tony is too preoccupied to make a comment, she drops to her knees and begins to dig around for her long-lost phone. Her skirt hikes a few inches up the backs of her thighs as she thrusts her arm underneath the seat, her rear-end sticking in the air and her hand groping around in the dark. She leans forward. _Ah, there it is. _Tucked against the seat divider, just barely grazed with her outstretched fingertips—

_Fwoom_.

A rushing sound, a loud boom that makes Pepper sit up so fast she hits her head on the underside of the seat and swears loudly. This gesture goes unnoticed by the men.

"What the hell is Venom doing in California?" Tony exclaims when he drops back down into the seat beside Happy. The two men share a dark look, broken only when Happy shrugs.

"Beats me, Boss," he replies. "Last I heard, Spider-Man beat the crap out of him in New York a week ago. Right?"

Pepper, having recovered from her unexpected jolt, eases her arm back under the seat and feels the blackberry again, just out of her reach. She takes a deep breath, exhales, crawls her fingers forward as far as they can reach. _Just a little more, sweetheart…_

"Yes, he did," says Tony. "And now it's my turn."

Even with her head under the seat, Pepper hears this declaration and knows exactly what it means:

No Tony, no conference, no partnership, and _definitely_ no sanity for one redhead personal assistant.

Damn his nobility to hell. Pepper, silently cursing Tony and all his desire to make the world a better place, abandons her quest to find the phone just in time to hear the passenger door open.

She resurfaces and her eyes connect with his from where she kneels, disheveled on the floor with half of her skirt higher than the other half. He stands outside the door, his hand frozen mid-reach for the briefcase that contains his Iron Man suit. Even Happy freezes where he sits, half turned around to watch.

"Tony—" begins Pepper hesitantly, speaking as if she were approaching some dangerous animal. Her hair has come partly loose from its no-nonsense bun and hangs, straggled, in her face. Both pairs of eyes are wide, staring. "Tony, don't even _think_ about it—"

Too late.

"Stay in the car, Pepper."

Tony grabs the handle of the suitcase, turns and collides with a nearby civilian, recovers clumsily, and runs into the retreating crowd.

"Oh no you don't—Tony!" Pepper, frantic because she will _not_ miss this appointment, not over her dead body, scrambles from her aching knees and hurdles out the door after him. She only loses her balance for a millisecond before she's stable on her four-inch heels and chasing after her boss.

"Pep, wait!" Happy begins to fumble with his seatbelt in preparation to run after her.

She doesn't look back. "Stay with the car, Happy! And find my cell phone!"

Happy looks around as if expecting to see someone _he_ can tell to stay with the car, but of course the car is empty save for himself, and so he can do nothing more than cross his arms and pout, exasperated. Another resounding crash and accompanying screams follow from downtown. He watches Pepper and Tony disappear into the crowd and waits, heart thumping wildly in his chest.

Meanwhile, Pepper spots her quarry a few yards ahead with his head bent low against the chaos, shuffling between a man and his sobbing wife. The image, she thinks briefly, is sickening; in the woman's arms is a screaming toddler, whose head seems to be half-covered in blood that drips down his mother's forearm. Pepper, too, scurries around them, but only after pulling a handkerchief from her sleeve and pressing it hastily into the man's shoulder. She doesn't look back, nor does she see the bewildered look the man gives her before using the fabric as a blood mop for his son.

Already a part of the bold PA begins to regret this chase—her feet, mostly, which ache with every lunge over the hot, uneven pavement—but the Malcolm Deal and the faces of the businessmen in her mind's eye are enough to make her run even faster in the California heat. That, and Pepper is anything but a delicate, sit-around sidekick. In college she'd been a go-getter, and nothing much has changed in the passing years except that she is now chasing her boss around instead of chasing an A in business school. If Tony dove, she would dive in right after him, into this crowd of people smart enough to be running _away_ from the chaos instead of _into_ it like he was.

The sun is hot, and she feels like she's in a sauna with her form-fitting pencil skirt and long-sleeves blouse. The crime scene unfolds ever-closer before her, but only as quickly as she can run in these ridiculous shoes that were most certainly not made for this kind of abuse. And yet, even with this handicap she's still able to catch up to Tony, who hasn't checked to see if she's followed him from the car.

"Tony!"

Pepper reaches out and makes a mad snatch for his jacket, misses, tries again. Her French-manicured fingers close on the sleeve of his suit, tugging him around so fast that his suitcase swings up into the gut of a passer-by. He'll have whiplash come morning time, but Pepper doesn't care very much at this point. She pulls him sideways into the nearest alleyway, which stands vacant except for a large dumpster and a chain-linked fence that blocks the end of the alley from the neighboring street.

"I told you to stay in the car," he says tonelessly. There is no humor in his eyes this time around, and though she won't admit it, this scares her more than the sound of Venom running rampant in the street.

"And I told _you_ we can't miss this meeting."

"Touché, but not the point. This is more important than some suit-and-tie meeting."

Another loud crash brakes through the stifling the city air, only louder and so close that it might be over their heads. Tony looks up, but Pepper doesn't have time to follow suit before she's shoved backwards and sent cascading to the ground in a mass of waving arms and too-high heels. She catches a glimpse of sky, a flash of white as half of a bus falls seemingly from nowhere to crash down in front of the mouth of the alley, and then a whole lot of black. The crash is loud. Glass shatters, metal creaks and scrapes in a monster of a symphony before screeching to a sudden halt.

Pepper opens her eyes and sees nothing. First she wonders if she's been knocked unconscious or rendered blind—she certainly has no breath, but that's most likely from the fall, until a moment later she realizes that there's a very large amount of pressure all around her.

The darkness isn't from blindness, it's from getting a facefull of Tony Stark's suit jacket because he's apparently pushed them both out of the way of the bus and landed on top of her in the process. Pepper can feel her back crying out in pain, several new scratches lining her legs, but otherwise she feels unscathed. With a small groan, she struggles to find her hands and pushes his heaving chest up and away when she finally does. His heart is hammering beneath her splayed fingers, the shirt underneath his jacket already damp with sweat. Tony himself, she sees as her eyes make their slow way from her hand to his agape mouth to his knitted eyebrows, has suffered minimal damage from the dive.

Their eyes meet, wide. "This was not in my job description, Mr. Stark," she snaps.

"I'm sorry," he replies, with just as much venom, "next time a super villain tries to drop a bus on you, I'll just let you save yourself. Now if you'll excuse me—" He heaves himself off of her, clambers to his feet, and picks up the briefcase where it landed when he'd shoved her, "As much as I'd love to just lay on top of you all day, I have a city to save. And since this alley has been conveniently been blocked on one side and people are too busy running for their lives on the other, I can suit up…" He gives a small grunt of effort from just out of her line of sight, "right… here…"

Pepper hoists herself into a sitting position, looks around for her boss, and sees that he's already ditched his jacket on the ground. The briefcase has been opened and the parts of the suit are assembling around him in perfect order, and Pepper can't help but for a fleeting second admire how much work Tony has apparently put into streamlining the suit's travel ability. She blinks, and it seems the second she's opened her eyes Tony Stark is no longer standing before her, but Iron Man in all his hotrod red and yellow glory. Iron Man turns around to face her, sees that she's still on the ground, and extends a hand.

Pepper takes it, if begrudgingly so. "We're not done here," she reminds him calmly, but the threat in her voice is clear enough to send an unpleasant creeping sensation down his neck.

"No, we're not," Tony agrees. "As soon as we get this taken care of, I'll fly to the meeting and we'll get there on time. It's very important to me that I do this. Now come on—"

In one jerk, he pulls her forcefully to her feet and she again loses her footing for just a moment. Her hair is really ruined now, her outfit dirtied and tarnished in several places, a number of scrapes littering her legs. Iron Man takes one hand and bushes some of the gravel off her shoulder with the announcement that "it's nothing, really", then turns and faces the chain-linked fence that marks their exit.

"Miss Potts, would you like a hand?"

"Don't flatter yourself, Tony. It's not like I've never jumped a fence before."

This much is true. She brushes past him towards the chain-linked fence, grabs it with both hands, but then seems to reconsider and turns around once more. A surge of anger has flared up in the pit of her chest, and although she's not sure where it came from she sure as hell knows who it's about to hit.

"Tell me something," she says to him. "Why does it always have to be about _you_, Tony?"

A silence ensues. Then, with a _pshh_ sound, the faceplate on Tony's helmet rises to reveal a genuinely confused, incredulous face. "I'm sorry, but I thought I'd heard something absurd from inside the suit I carry around in order to protect innocent people. Could you repeat that last comment?"

"You heard me; I asked why it's always about you!"

She takes a deep breath, frustrated and confused by what she's saying. The words are forming on the tip of her tongue and she can't stop them because they make so much _sense_, even though the rational part of her brain is screaming '_The meeting!'_

"You may wear the suit and fight crime, but at the end of the day, who is it for? And even if it's _not_ for yourself, somehow you always make it personal. Why is that, Tony? Chew on that one for a bit."

On that note, she turns her back on a very confused Tony Stark and hitches her fingers in the fence. A memory of her childhood flits across the forefront of her memory, almost like a flashback, of her hopping the fence to the town pool with one of her high school boyfriends. While this particular memory really has no other connection to the "here and now" besides the fence-hopping correlation, it couples with her anger and gives her the strength to lift herself upwards, over the fence, and down the other side. Constricting—albeit more ragged than when she'd darted from the car—skirt, heels, and all. Tony stares at her from the other side with his mouth agape, clearly impressed with her feat, even when his mind is still reeling from her accusation. She tells herself that she doesn't care.

Tony stares in this manner only until a crash and a scream snap him back to reality. Giving her the up-and-down look once more, he hops over the fence in a single suit-assisted bound and lands beside his miffed PA, who has begun to tap her designer shoes against the pavement with more than a little impatience.

"Is there anything I can do to make this go faster, Mr. Stark?" Pepper asks.

"Yeah." Tony pulls the faceplate back down over his head and snaps it into place, the mechanism making another soft _fshh_ sound followed by a sharp click. He brushes past her and into the street without looking back. "Don't die."

Pepper rolls her eyes now as she starts after him with the typical _click-click-clack_ of her heels mocking him all the way, but upon later reflection she'll remember that little nougat of advice with a hint of irony.

She sighs, annoyed and still very much concerned about the meeting as she follows Tony into the crowded street. It's hard for her to believe that there can still be people sitting and running around while Venom (and now, much to the joy of the people, Iron Man) are screwing around on the skyscrapers, but no matter. Instead of sitting around like a helpless sidekick while Tony gets to fly and miss his very important meeting, Pepper elects to act as the sensible civilian and get people out of the street and, namely, out of harm's way.

Stepping over what looks like half the contents of an abandoned grocery cart, Pepper makes her way to the first people she sees—a man and woman whose arguing is loud enough to grab her attention.

"Gerald, it's just one street over and I have an appointment! How long could it possibly take for these superheroes to finish fighting and let us get on with our lives?" The woman bats away a shining ringlet with one clawlike, very well-taken care of hand and blinks upward at her husband.

"Too long," the husband replies, crossing his arms against a navy polo shirt. Pepper recognizes wealth all too well when she sees it, and the accompanying snobbery goes hand-in-hand far too often for her taste, but helping is helping.

They don't notice Pepper until she speaks, and when she does they both jump enough to make Pepper herself jump.

"Knowing them, I can't see it being done for a while," she says calmly, in the same tone she reserves for sending away Tony's one night stands. "I wouldn't stick around for too long, because Venom doesn't really care who he hurts, but if you need to get to the street over, there's a fence down about fifty yards from here that leads into the other street. If you can get around the bus, you can get to your appointment."

The couple stares, Pepper looks back with only a small hint of a smirk turned in the corner of her mouth.

"Who _are_ you?" asks the woman, turning to get a look at the disheveled Pepper. Pepper cringes at the sight of too much eyeliner and a very obvious foundation line running along the woman's jaw. She pushes aside the urge to reach up and smudge it off with her torn sleeve.

Pepper opens her mouth to respond, and indeed the word "Pepper" is halfway out of her parted lips when both of the aforementioned "supers" crash down on top of the couple's parked car, so tangled up in one another that Pepper isn't able to tell who's winning. The woman screams, her husband pulls her away so fast that they seem to vanish on the spot, but Pepper can only stand there with her own name still hanging on her lips. The sickening crunch of an Audi being destroyed ringing all around her does not bring her back to life, but Tony's amplified yell seems to do the trick.

"_MOVE!"_

The words only half register with the redhead, who can't get past the thought that a large piece of car just flew right past her left ear and into the solid brick wall a few feet away. Still in a state of semishock, she stumbles backwards, the heel of her shoe slides into one of the street's many uneven grooves, snaps off, and she is sent sprawling backwards—yet again, she thinks scathingly—in a very silly-looking arm-waving tumble. Pepper, her vision spinning, lands a short distance away and yelps uncharacteristically as her shoulder connects painfully with a telephone pole that is attached to the brick apartment building. One hand flies out to steady herself against the wall, the other flies to the joint in her arm.

Tony seems a million miles away at the moment, Happy and her blackberry even further than that now that she is slumping sideways against the telephone pole her shoulder has just made friends with. For a moment she's afraid that she's going to pass out—she _does_ lose her eyesight as those little black dots dance before her eyes, growing into one splotch that covers her area of vision, but a moment later she's shaking her head and looking wildly around for any sign of her employer and who she had assumed up until now was _Spider-Man's_ nemesis, not Tony's (or Iron Man's, which she supposes is more politically correct in this circumstance). The pain in her shoulder has already begun to splinter down her side like a seeping poison, not so much that it knocks her unconscious, but enough to keep her slumped sideways for the time being, out of sight and hopefully out of mind as well. But she's not paying any attention to her own problems, not while the chaos in the street is only beginning to wind down. Most of the people are long gone, leaving only a handful of clusters scattered throughout her blurred vision, some bickering and others trying to take advantage of the many abandoned, unguarded stores lining the street.

Pepper presses one hand against her still-spinning head and takes a good look around. As far as she can tell, Tony isn't getting much closer to ending this… whatever it is. Pepper's head hurts too much to give it—the situation, that is—a proper name, and even if she did she knows it wouldn't matter. The meeting will be starting shortly, and there will be a very noticeably empty seat at the business negotiations table—

The next few seconds of Pepper Potts's life pass so quickly that she remembers them in fragments, little pieces of a bigger puzzle that she can't seem to put together. There is a rush of laughter as the webslinger flies twenty feet over her head and grabs onto the telephone pole that she's using as a crutch, a loud crunching noise, she herself scrambling sideways. Half of her—the rational half, which suits her unwilling body little good—realizes that in his escape, Venom has dislodged the telephone pole and half of the building too. The other half is overcome with a buzzing noise all at once as a rush of gold and red flies past her vision, a mere second (too late) after Pepper hits the ground. Her head smacks once against the sidewalk, she opens her mouth but cannot scream or shout because she cannot even _breathe_ under the weight of undeniably broken ribs and only God knows what else. While short-lived, the pain that erupts from her waist and crawls up her chest is the most excruciating she had ever known, more than she'd ever care to know or remember. And yet as soon as the pain floods her body, it's ebbing away again and leaving a trail of more mild, stiff pain in its wake—a symptom, Pepper comes to realize, that she probably won't be sticking around much longer.

Pepper hears her name, amplified and ringing through all of Tony's armor but as concrete as the ground she's sprawled across. Then it sounds again, more muffled, like her head has been submerged under water. Something trickles from her ear and down the nape of her neck. Hardly conscious, Pepper makes a vain attempt at freeing herself from what feels like ten thousand pounds of brick and telephone pole, yet even her most ferocious attempts barely cause a twitch in her arms and legs, and it is at this moment that she realizes she is going to die here out in the middle of some big city she can't name, a casualty of a fight she never wanted to occur in the first place.

Either her vision or her mind (she can't tell which is which anymore, can't even think a coherent thought) crawls in and out of the fuzzy ground between death and consciousness. The pain has subsided into nothing but a welcome feeling of numbness and incredible weight. A flash of color flits across her vision in a blur, and when Pepper concentrates her hardest she realizes that Tony has abandoned the fight and is kneeling over her, the faceplate on his helmet absent so that he can get a better look at her. She wishes she could make out his features, the expression on his face. Is it sad? Angry? All she can see is the in-and-out blur that makes up the very basics of Tony Stark's face, hovering above her own.

"_Pepper, hang on—"_

And _that_ sounds just as far away as the rest of the world to Pepper Potts, who can no more hear him say that help is just three minutes away than she can feel his sweaty hand gripping her cold one, or see his eyes widen in horror as he takes in everything about her from the way her hips are twisted at an awkward angle to the splotch of red that is blossoming across her blouse.

The final thoughts that flit across the forefront of Pepper's mind are brief and yet so clear that she feels she can reach out and snatch them from the air if she only tries hard enough. There is her at one of many benefit dinners, standing in a backless dress with her elbows propped carelessly on the ledge of the balcony, a frustrated tear slipping down her cheek. There is her on her knees in the SUV, one arm stuck under the seat in search of her phone and her skirt inching up her legs. There is a room full of angry-looking businessmen and her, all alone in her torn blouse and skirt and flyaway hair, everyone staring as she holds her hands up in defense and says, "It's not my fault I'm late, he died on the way here because he had to go jump into a fight." Then there is a looming darkness, bearing ever-closer to where she lays amidst the chaos, and she welcomes it with figuratively open arms so long as this last thought is not real outside her spinning imagination.

To Pepper, there is nothing but the fading sensation of numbness, the distant sound of sirens, Tony's face blurring back into a mass of moving color and sound.

Pepper closes her eyes, and then there is nothing.

Silence.

ooo

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A/n: So there you have it, the introduction to what I hope is a fairly successful story! I've got a lot of ideas for this one, but I also must warn you: I'm not much of a believer in "instant gratification". In other words, I believe that characters have to suffer before they can get what they want, so there will be plenty more interesting obstacles for dear Pepper and Tony before they go anywhere.

That being said, I encourage you to give me any tips or ideas that can improve my writing as a whole. I already know where the story is going and how to get there, so I'm really seeking more to improve my writing (although I definitely will listen to any and all ideas offered!). So if something strikes you as wrong (except Tony's eye-color, damn it! Haha) in the prose itself, let me know and I'll do my best to correct it.

Thanks so much for reading, and I hope you're looking forward to reading as much as I'm looking forward to writing!


	2. Admission

A/n: I do not care that I have to wake up at 5:30 tomorrow morning, solely because I really need to get this chapter out. Quite frankly, upon later reflection I realized that it was probably really stupid to start a story when my favorite show of all time is ending in a week, and I've been so wrapped up in AVATAR this entire week that I haven't gotten much done.

This chapter was supposed to be a lot longer, but it turned out to be a transition from the first to the third chapters, hence the slightly choppy style and the chapter title that doesn't make any sense. Awesome. But I hope you can enjoy this, even though it's not very well proof read and is sort of a plot device more than anything, because it's certainly interesting to work on!

Disclaimer: I own nothing!

Happy Reading!

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_II. Admission_

Amidst the camera flashes and gawking press is where Tony has always felt the most secure. Pre-Afghanistan Tony would chat it up on the podium, tell it like it was—or, more likely, like it was in his head—all the while flashing a signature grin, making eyes at the most gorgeous reporters, and making mental promises to buy them drinks later. Half the time he never even knew what he was saying; he'd just talk and talk about his work and the betterment of mankind and the audience would love him to death no matter what he said.

That was then. Now, as he stands in a similar position, on the same podium he has caused more harm than good on, Tony feels more than just a little ill. He speaks without grin nor with straying eyes, even going as far to drink the water—oh how he wished it were scotch instead—that sits beside his hand on the podium. Rhodey, who stands beside him in sturdy military gear, notices this with a slight frown. To him these little gestures mean a whole lot more than thirst or shot nerves. It's all part of the grieving process, Rhodey knows, but it doesn't make seeing his friend distraught any easier.

"To wrap this up, I'd just really like to thank all the generous donors, men, and women who have put so much time and effort into the reconstruction of the city's buildings; they should be done in about a month or so." Tony pauses for effect, waits for the end to sink in, and then: "Any questions?"

The room begins to buzz with energy and voices, every reporter clad with a notebook and pen trying to get a word in. Unperturbed by the clamor, Tony points to the first person he sees, who happens to be a fashionable woman in her late thirties. When it becomes clear that he has chosen someone to speak, the rest of the room drops off into silence. The woman takes a quick, haughty look around before turning back to Tony and beginning to speak in a sugar-laced voice that doesn't much help his churning stomach.

"Mr. Stark, at your last conference three weeks ago, you confirmed your presence at the event but never explained how exactly the alleged "super hero" Iron Man came to find your PA Virginia Potts amidst the rubble, or why he stopped to help specifically her in the first place. Do you have any… speculation?"

The last word leaves the room hanging by a thread. The reporter bats her heavily-lined lashes up at him, a somewhat self-satisfied smirk playing on her lips. Although they have been through this type of thing before, it is much to Tony's chagrin that some people haven't fully latched on to his denial of being the superhero he had previously claimed to be. While a part of him still wants to take the credit for his deeds, there is not much he can do but dent deny deny every little thing that links him to Iron Man. Sometimes he comes so close to confessing again that he needs to physically bite his own tongue until the urge passes and leaves him with some quirky remark. This time is almost one of those moments, but it is a confession that sits on his lips instead of a proclamation.

_it's all my fault oh god i can't i can't deal with it_

His fingers clench at his side, out of sight as to not give away his stress. The calm expression on his face doesn't betray that his bitten nails are digging little crescent moons into his palms, nor does the casual sip of water he takes. Off to his side, Rhodey makes a sudden movement with his hand that means he's receiving an incoming call, and ducks out of sight through the adjacent doorway.

"Unfortunately, as I have previously mentioned," Tony begins, shooting the reporter a pointed look, "at the time of the accident, I was incapacitated in the alley way where I was eventually found. Witness reports—you have seen them, I'm guessing? There are a number of them—claim that as this 'Venom' was trying to escape from the robbery he had committed up the street, he pulled down half of a building on my Personal Assistant, and Iron Man only missed saving her by, I don't know, _inches_, I guess." He shrugs, though inside his head the scene replays in slow motion again and he forces himself to take a sip of water, lest he become ill. "As for why he helped her, I suppose it's just because that's what superheroes do. Any more questions?"

This time he points to a burly man with a notepad clenched in one fat hand and a pen in the other. He looks up at the billionaire through beady eyes and asks in scruffy tones, "Have you any information updates on the condition of your PA, Pepper Potts?"

Rhodes takes this moment to appear in the room once more, walking as expressionlessly as any soldier can, to take his place back at Tony's side. He shoots Tony a sidelong glance, leans over and whispers a question in his ear.

"_Should we end it here?_"

Tony would very much like to do just that, but it has never been in his nature to leave an audience hanging, especially if the matter is actually of some importance to him. So he gives his head a small shake at the offer and allows the reporters and other attendees to sit in a rather tense silence for a moment or two.

"To be completely honest, I've been so wrapped up in working on the company that I haven't seen Miss Potts in person in several days, but this morning I received my daily report from her doctors, stating that her condition is… unchanged." Tony shoots a quick, significant look at Rhodey, who answers with only a quirk of his eyebrow. Time to go, he decides, before this gets any more personal. "I'm sure it's only a matter of time before she's back on her…" he falters, thinking that this term is perhaps not the best one. "—before she's back to work again. For the meantime, all we can do is wait and hope for the best. Thank you."

As Tony and Rhodey exit stage right to the sounds of scattered applause and camera clicking, the latter reaches up and places a hand on the other's shoulder. He leans inward so that no outsiders will hear and hisses, "You're gonna want to hear this."

Tony rotates his shoulder and ducks through the narrow doorway into the crisp evening air with Rhodey right behind him. "Can it wait? There's a bar two blocks from here with my name plastered all over it."

The last thing he wants right now is to discuss any sort of business, because all he can see through his fresh new sunglasses is Pepper's pale face, Pepper with those hospital respiratory tubes jammed up her nose—or worse, Pepper lying in the hot city street with a fresh river of blood seeping from behind her ear, and he wants it out of his mind. Now. The montage of pictures in his mind has driven him nearly mad for the last few weeks, to the point where simply going down to his workshop and tinkering with his suit no longer works as a substitute for straight liquor and a ten-hour nap. And every time he thinks the images have passed, something like a press conference makes it worse all over again.

"No, I don't think it can."

When Tony ignores his friend and goes for the car's passenger door handle, Rhodey heaves a sigh and grab's Tony's sleeve with one hand.

"While you were talking, I got a call from the hospital."

Tony hesitates, then turns around slowly. His sunglasses have been pulled away to reveal a pair of wide, inquisitive eyes. But behind these very apparent expressions is something else, a sort of fear that Rhodey can't quite put his finger on.

"Tony, she's waking up."

ooo

When Pepper opens her eyes for the first time in three weeks, she becomes immediately aware of several things, the first of which is that she is surrounded on all sides by people dressed in scrubs and white jackets, all talking all at once. Next comes the realization that she has no idea how she got here, or what "here" even is. And finally—and this revelation scares her more than the people poking and prodding at her—as she looks around through sleep-filled eyes, Pepper feels a great sense of longevity and space, the feeling that a great deal of time has passed since she last opened her eyes. At the moment she doesn't know what it means, but the feeling is so overwhelming that she has only taken one good look around before she's passed out a second time and the medics start talking in faster voices.

"Virginia? Sweetie, can you hear me?"

She can, but the voice tunes in and out like rolling waves. Although her mind is buzzing at seemingly a million miles an hour and she's desperately trying to cling to this new consciousness, there is a part of her that seems to understand more than the other. Something has happened—something bad, she can only assume, since the only memory in the forefront of her mind has to do with being surrounded by medics—but she doesn't exactly remember what.

_But enough of that_, she thinks to herself. _For now, just keeping awake will suffice._

"Virginia?"

With a soft groan, Pepper looks up from where she lies and sees the face of an elderly doctor swimming into focus; first the dark-rimmed glasses, wiry gray hair, patient smile.

"How many fingers am I holding up?"

Pepper takes about ten seconds to look. "Four." Her voice is cracked and it sends an unpleasant chill down her spine. From lack of use, she supposes, but how long has it been?

"Very good! Now tell me, how do you feel?"

At this, she can't help but feel a tiny bit stupid as she replies, "Confused, mostly, but I don't hurt anywhere."

"Good, I'm glad to hear you're not in any pain."

"Who are you?"

The other doctors and nurses are no longer in the room, save for one tired-looking blonde off to her left who has been fiddling with Pepper's IV since she woke up. Although she's more tired than she could ever remember being in her life—she notes this with a hint of irony, since she's sure she's been asleep longer than ever before, too—Pepper doesn't object when the blonde nurse rotates the bed into a sitting position with a hand remote. The room is bland at best, from what she can see without turning her head in either direction, all white all the time. Boring, but with a touch of hominess brought on buy a simple painting of flowers on the wall. She smiles slightly and, tearing her eyes from the watercolor painting, looks to the aging doctor.

"Doctor Morgan Stanley," says the doctor, holding out a hand.

Pepper shakes it, even though her fingers feel more like jello than fingers, and remarks jokingly, "Is this a motor skills test?"

"Congratulations Virginia, you pass basic hand skills and awareness," he replies in a tone to match her own. Then his smile droops a slight bit and she remembers that she's in a hospital once more. "But in all seriousness, I'm afraid you've been in a grave accident. You probably don't remember…"

But all of a sudden a crazed laugh rings in her ears and she sees Tony's face flash before her memory. Frowning, she blinks at the doctor. "Oh, you know."

Morgan Stanley nods once, pats the hand that sits at her side, straightens up where he stands with one hand thrust deep in the pocket of his white jacket. "Well," he begins with a sigh that makes him look older than he has previously, "We're going to run some bloodwork and other tests, but you're more than welcome to sleep through it."

"Thank you," she mutters, darkly curious as to why they have to do so many tests. Under normal circumstances—well, Pepper has always considered a visit to the hospital abnormal, though she has carted Tony there once or twice—she'd lighten the mood by making a joke to herself, or by pausing to admire the large table of flowers, cards, and chocolates she notices off by the window, but as her eyes begin to droop again, Pepper can't think of anything funny about this situation.

Not yet, any way. This time when she closes her eyes, the sleep she drifts off into is pleasant, sound, and very much welcome.

ooo

Tony is halfway through the towering Winsley Memorial Hospital doors when he remembers that he had run right by the parking meter beside his Audi. His polished shoes slow to an abrupt halt, one foot on the indoor tile and one on the pavement outside, his upper half turning around to face the aforementioned vehicle. The air conditioned lobby teases the side of his face and tosses his hair as if demanding that he leave the unpaid meter behind, but the part of him that doesn't want to deal with more paperwork—of which there has been a large pile accumulating in his desk lately—figures that if he has two quarters, it'll do for now. Tony hesitates, then steps away from the rush of cool air and back into the blistering humidity.

He reaches into one of the pockets of his suit with an inward groan at the debilitating distraction from his latest mission and pulls out a handful of small items: a penny, some pocket lint, two screws. Well, carrying around a penny doesn't do a billionaire much good, he figures, so he tosses it aside. The pocket lint goes back where it came from, along with the two screws, which Tony deems worthy of keeping for now. Sighing, he takes off once more through the iron-wrought glass doors. The parking meter can wait, Pepper cannot.

The hospital is nothing but a blur to Tony Stark, but he attributes this to the fact that he's running through the front lobby and up the escalator as fast as he can without being stopped by a rent-a-cop. He's been here enough to know the place like the schematics for the Iron Man, right down to where the closest water fountain and the fastest route to the ICU is. After the first week of popping constantly in and out of the place, he's memorized the wing names and the important doctors. By the second, the café has his order to perfection (or at least as close to perfection as a cheap cup of coffee without scotch can be) and waiting on the counter every morning by eleven. But this morning Tony blows right by the stand without looking back at where the little café sits, tucked in a remote corner of just one of many waiting rooms. His head is bent against whoever might try to distract him from his mission—attractive nurses, doctors, that one housekeeping chick who he would swear doesn't wear a bra. Pepper would be proud, he's certain of this much. Now he might even get to tell her that his eyes haven't wandered in almost three weeks, with a handful of urgent exceptions. The thoughts are flying through Tony's head, each one less rational than the previous, until suddenly the only thing on his mind is where he's going: just up two more flights of stairs, through the ICU doors that feel a lot heavier than usual, and he's standing in a long, door-lined hallway painted an ugly shade of off-white and chrome.

He finally stops here, panting only slightly thanks to his never-ending "gotta save the world" routine. Save for a handful of nurses and interns working at the nurse's station off to one side, the hallway is vacant and equally as silent. The mutterings of the medical staff dance in the back of his head, to faint to make into words and yet just enough of white noise to keep him from feeling as if he's been locked in solitary confinement when the door _thuds_ behind him. Tony takes a look around, sees a few nurses staring but not saying a word, and takes this as the liberty of allowing himself through the door halfway down the hallway, where he more than expects Pepper to be waiting for him.

"What's the scoop, Stan?"

He has to stop himself from shortening Doctor Morgan Stanley's name to 'Morg', mostly because he's not on first-name terms with the man but also because the name is a little too morbid for even Tony. He pushes past the blonde nurse he absolutely has never ogled (not more then three times, anyway) to get a better look at Pepper. His heart dips in his chest at the sight of her; more than anything, Tony had been hoping that she would at least be awake, if not sitting up in bed with a smile playing on her lips and maybe a "hey boss" or "What the hell happened, Tony?" for him, but no luck. She's as passed out as can be, without so much as a smirk on her face. Tony frowns pointedly.

"How is she?"

The aging doctor steps up beside Tony and clicks his tongue. "She came around about an hour ago, so the staff rushed in and started taking vitals and she lost consciousness."

Tony makes a half-grunt to acknowledge this, but his eyes never leave Pepper's pale, freckled face. At least she's not brain-dead—it's all he can think, even though the frown on his face portrays dissatisfaction. Her chest is rising and falling slowly beneath her blue hospital gown, her hair lying neatly (or as neatly as a bedridden woman can look) across her shoulders in small waves. Someone must have combed it, he thinks, and though the thought is a pleasant one he still can't bring himself to smile. His chest seems to have wandered off into his throat and pounds away there like a timpani. It hasn't really struck him until just now that his deepest fear is, for now, no longer a worry, and although he can't be sure that it will last—he isn't sure of much right now, since he's not even sure he's breathing—Tony can't help but allow the tiniest beam of hope to shine through the clouds in his head.

After a moment of thoughtful silence, he presses onward.

"So, how did she do? Alert? Zombie-like? Talk to me, Stan."

"Well," Doctor Stanley continues thoughtfully, pausing a moment to consult a clipboard when the blonde nurse hands it to him on her way out the door, "She came-to again shortly afterwards, and knew who she was, a little about why she's here. You know the drill. As far as I could see, she seems very alert—shook my hand and everything."

He pauses now. Tony senses a sort of farawayness about the man, and sure enough when he looks he sees that the doctor has indeed drifted off into his own thoughts. The man presses two gnarled fingers to his lips, runs them down the front of his chin.

"It's remarkable," he says, glancing once at Tony. "In cases like these, we almost never see so much improvement in so little time."

Tony shifts his shoulders in a halfhearted shrug, tilts his head to one side and back. "Not remarkable enough. Does she know yet?"

"No, not yet."

"Good. I want to talk to her about it myself."

It suddenly occurs to Tony that his palms are slick with sweat, though he can't recall ever beginning to feel warm in the first place. Whether out of joy or apprehension is another issue altogether. Maybe both. The tie he'd put on early on this morning for the conference is stifling, as is the jacket. Tony loosens the and pulls the jacket off, all the while noting with a hint of annoyance that Morgan Stanley has not stopped staring at him for a good minute. The man's light eyes flicker from the clipboard to the unconscious redhead.

"Mr. Stark, I'm not sure that's advi—"

"No, I'm perfectly sure. And in the meantime—" Tony dips his knees and pulls out a small backless chair from the underside of the hospital bed and seats himself down on it, "I'm going to hang out here, if you're done with all your tests."

"…Of course, Mr. Stark."

It doesn't matter what Doctor Morgan Stanley wants or what he _thinks_ is best, because Tony Stark is, well, Tony Stark, and nothing is going to change that fact. Annoyed, perhaps, by Tony's general resolve, Stanley nods once to the last remaining nurse and then he's out the door with the woman in tow.

Tony doesn't look back.

He scoots back and forth on the chair a number of times, until he nearly slips backwards off of it. The door snaps shut, leaving a silence in its wake almost as uncomfortable as the seat he's positioned somewhat awkwardly on. He can't seem to get rid of the unpleasant sensation—worry, maybe—out of his gut, and now that he's acknowledged it he can feel it spreading all throughout his body, moving and inching along to the steady beat of Pepper's heart monitor. But after a few moments of tapping his fingers to the exact beat of the Happy Birthday Song, he for some reason feels a whole lot better…

_Should have gone to the bar first,_ is the first of many fleeting, dry thoughts that punctuate his reeling mind. He's already cancelled his appointments for the rest of the day, so all there is to do is sit, and wait, for something—anything, really, he doesn't mind—to happen.

Then again, a large sum of time could pass before Pepper wakes up again, Tony realizes with a deepening frown. He could always run to the convenience store and maybe the liquor store down the street for a snack, or swing by the bar for a round or two. His eyes actually dart off to the far right, where he knows the door is just our of his range of sight. But no, he wouldn't go even if he could, he knows this much is true, as much as he likes to think otherwise. Because he knows that in the hour he's gone, Pepper will open her eyes and find out the hard way, and nobody is going to take the alternative away from him.

And if the thought of missing her wake up isn't enough, he remembers the unpaid parking meter outside and decides that he doesn't want to face that particular issue for a while.

_Avoid and evade_, he scolds himself. _Nicely done, Tony._

Pepper gives a small sigh in sleep and turns her face towards his, a lock of hair falling across her forehead. Tony picks his head up as if an alarm has gone off, only to realize that nothing has happened. Just a sigh, just a sigh. Nobody in his life has ever kept him waiting, not ever. Nobody but Pepper Potts, who never wanted to keep him waiting in the first place, but here they are.

Feeling oddly as if he's in a dramatic movie, Tony crosses his arms on Pepper's bed and leans forward, resting his forehead down in the crook of his arm. He moves one hand blindly outward to find her hand where it lays, and when he finds it he takes it in his own. Her hand is cold.

It's going to be a long night. Tony sighs.

ooo

* * *

A/n: I am very much hoping to have the next chapter up soon, but firs things first: Avatar just ended, and I have a lot to write about for that fandom before my enthusiasm for it dies for the last time (sad but inevitable!). So I'll be doing a bit of stuff for my dear Avatards before I get out another chapter, just to warn you; hopefully not a long wait, not as unnaceptably long as this one!

Thanks for reading, crit is always welcome!


	3. Resolution

A/n: I was going to tell you that I've been really busy (I have bee, just for the record), but then I realized there's no excuse for not updating in three months. I'm really, truly ashamed. If you remember this story... great! If not, you might want to skim the previous chapters.

Disclaimer: I own nothing.

Happy Reading!

* * *

_III. Resolution_

_Breathe._

Pepper finds herself in the hazy, uncertain semiconscious with an inhale caught in her chest. She can feel and hear a number of things, from the beep of the heart monitor to the comfortable sensation of warmth encompassing her hand. The breath, after a pause, unhitches in an exhale—quick, sharp—and she is vaguely aware of her head lolling to one side as her vision begins to focus.

Being very much nearsighted and without glasses, Pepper can hardly see anything ten feet away from her blue hospital gown. However, her shortcoming has no effect on the objects near to her, and thus when Pepper finally comes-to she has no trouble seeing that there is a face not five inches from her own. But instead of screaming or even starting in surprise, as many would do in this situation, Pepper smiles serenely at the passive face of her sleeping employer.

"Tony." Her own voice is more sleep-ridden than she likes to hear.

Upon further dozy inspection, Pepper discovers that the source of warmth she had originally felt is his large hand over her small one. A small twinge of gratitude sweeps through her chest. _How long has he been here? _She wonders. Probably a while, since he's so asleep with the side of his face buried in the crook of his elbow and his disheveled hair matted down over his head. He looks paler than she remembers seeing him, less… confident, somehow. The idea is not a comforting one for Pepper, who hasn't seen a "normal" thing since awaking for the first time any number of hours ago. His condition might just be stemmed from the fact that he's sleeping, hunched on a backless chair with his upper half on the edge of the bed, but it just doesn't seem right to her—well, none of this does, really. At the sound of his whispered name, the hand over hers clenches momentarily and she really _does_ jump in surprise, a soft breath sounds in his chest like a grunt, and Tony's eyes open.

A fleeting moment of silence passes between the two groggy people, the same sort of feeling experienced after waking from a very vivid dream. Pepper stares at Tony and he stares right back, both lying down (though Pepper more comfortably than he, she's sure) and unspeaking, until the magnitude of what has happened in the last… whatever period of time, she doesn't know—hits them full force. Then there is a quiet, single syllable that Tony can do little more than whisper from where he sits: "_Pep._"

She really thinks he looks ill. His face doesn't hold the normal air of slightly arrogant assurance for which Tony Stark is rightfully famous, and the dark circles under his eyes are more alarming than Pepper would normally believe. She's rescued him from the cave that he calls his garage after three nights of no sleep, scooped him from the floor of his bathroom when he's so drunk that he calls her Mom, even dabbed Neosporin on his semi-conscious neck after a day of crime-fighting, but something is far different about _this_ tired Tony Stark. He's not just tired or half dead or even recovering from a massive hangover—there's more emotion backed behind those pale features and scruffed-up Armani shirt than she's ever seen, but she can't place it. Before she has a chance to mention just how terrible he looks, Tony rolls his face into the crook of his arm with a hollow laugh.

"Good God, Pepper, I thought you were going to die on me." She can barely hear his muffled voice through his arm, but she catches it anyway.

Pepper can't help but smile. In this unfamiliar land of scratchy sheets and beeping instruments that probably at one point kept her alive, smiling is the only thing she can do without hurting herself.

"Nice to see you too, boss," she says.

Tony laughs at this and raises his head from his arm, releasing her hand from his grasp to rub the bridge of his nose. "You have no idea."

"How long have you been waiting here?"

"Oh, just an hour." Tony takes a quick look at the watch on his wrist. "Or seven. It's all the same to me."

A small laugh leaps up from her chest, but as soon as it does a splitting pain sears out of her ribs and she stops as abruptly as she's started. Tony's smile drops as he surveys her with more than just a little dark curiosity. Just as she has begun to come to life once again, so have her apparently prevalent wounds—fleeting at first, and then a sharp jab in her ribs actually causes her to reach one hand up and hold her side. In a flash, Tony is sitting upright and alert. She throws out one hand.

"Wait! Don't… don't get the doctor yet," she manages. "We have to talk first."

"I'm not going anywhere."

Tony is up and walking around to the other side of the bed, scooting between two machines to access the remote control that has been left upside-down on the bedside table. He retrieves it, sets the bed (and, consequently, Pepper as well) into a sitting position with the push of a button before placing the remote beside Pepper and sitting down on the edge of her bed. The mattress creaks with the combined weight of them, and yet she doesn't seem to notice the change; her blurry eyes are set firmly on his grave features.

"So," she begins, only because she's at a loss for words with all the thoughts rumbling around in her head. "Did Iron Man come to the rescue?"

Bad question. While Pepper is not sure what she's expecting—a small (bordering on cocky) laugh, a quirked eyebrow or maybe he'll grab her hand again and reassure her that it was "the quickest thinking in the world"—she knows she's not expecting to see his face fall, and she's baffled when he shakes his head like a condemned man. Pepper almost gapes. It won't be the first time.

Tony says it so quietly that she almost misses it: "No. Iron Man wasn't fast enough."

And there is the missing piece to the puzzle, the "other" emotion that she's been trying to place since first seeing him: guilt. Immense, overwhelming guilt. Pepper thinks she might cry. She briefly wonders why she hasn't yet.

"I take full blame for what happened to you, Pepper," he mutters, crystal eyes locked only a foot away from her own in an intense stare. "And I promise that I'm going to fix it."

A pang of panic surges through her chest. "Fix _what_, Tony?"

"I've been working on the solution since the accident, and with a little help from the right people, I'm on the track to getting it to work," he assures her, though Pepper hasn't an inkling as to what he's talking about. Her fingers curl against the itchy sheets as a small bubble of frustration grows and bursts.

"Tony!" She exclaims. "Just tell me what's wrong!"

This cuts his rambling explanation to a quick end. They share a steady stare that is not wholly uncommon for them—it's a test of determination and just a little bit of mind reading, usually in regards to attending meetings—before he finally sighs.

"Look at my hand."

Pepper does, but when her eyes drop to where his hand is sitting on her knee, the answer doesn't become immediately apparent. Besides, the general motion is blurry without her glasses. She leans over and snatches her designer-rimmed glasses from the table, pushes them onto her face, and looks again at his hand. There doesn't seem to be anything wrong. She can't tell if there's any tissue damage because the sheet is draped over her legs, but the spot where his hand is placed doesn't have any painful reaction to his touch. He gently squeezes the spot to the same reaction.

Nonplussed, she tears her eyes from her leg and looks back at Tony. "So?"

He frowns. "What do you feel?"

"Nothing. I-I don't—"

And there it is. The source for his guilt and probably for her being bed-ridden for only God knows how long. Her eyes widen behind her glasses of their own account as a most horrible thought springs into her mind. Pushing herself into a sitting position on the bed with little to no regard for the splitting pain in her side, she nearly knocks Tony to the floor as she pulls the sheet over.

At the sight of her own pale legs and knees—scabbed knees, yes, but they're Pepper's knees and she doesn't care how they look as long as they're hers—she lets out an enormous sigh and falls back against the hospital pillows, clutching her roaring ribcage.

"You scared me half to death," she scolds her surprised employer from where she sits, chest heaving. "I thought I'd lost my legs and they'd put on a pair of prosthetics."

To her surprise, Tony only shakes his head. "That might be better, Pep, considering the circumstances."

"I could do without the cryptic talk, Tony," she says, though with some affection that goes unnoticed. She can't think of a thing that would be worse than not having her own legs.

Tony sighs and runs a hand over his face before he responds, "Look, Pepper, when Venom pulled that wall down on top of you, you landed at a bad angle." She senses the understatement. "Coupled with the force of I don't even know how many bricks, your spine had some serious damage. We got you into surgery fast enough to fix most of the wound, but the nerves suffered serious damage."

Pepper stares. "So I lost all the feeling in my legs?" It's not a question, not really. Her eyes shift to where the hospital gown cuts off right above her knee, hesitant.

"Feeling, motion, basic use—it all comes down to the same, doesn't it?"

There's that bitterness in his voice again, the kind he usually uses when referring to Stane or weapon thieves. The parallel would make Pepper shudder, but she's too busy being overwhelmed with the idea to make any movement. No more walking, no more _click-click-clack_ of her five-inch heels on tiled floors, no more literally chasing Tony down the hallway with a memo in one hand and an overfilled coffee mug in the other—

Good God, no more walking? Pepper puts her face in one hand, Tony gripping the other with the sort of expression on his face that implies he's afraid she might run away (_bad comparison_, she scolds herself) if he lets go. There is a large part of her that would very much like to break down and cry into her sheets, but she's still too numb to do much more than sigh and rub her eyes beneath her glasses.

At long last, she finds her voice. Tony is peering at her very carefully, but she determinedly avoids his gaze, her hands still over her face. "What am I going to _do_, Tony?"

"I told you I was working on it."

She looks up from her hands at the tone in his voice. "What—? You mean—you can fix it?"

"I don't know yet."

A fleeting pause passes between them and Pepper stares at her employer's face, his furrowed eyebrows and the look that says he's been spending lots of time in his garage recently. She can't even begin to imagine what he's cooked up. It's probably dangerous, very illegal, and most likely some sort of secret project that she's not going to like the sound of. Yet the very prospect of being able to walk is a wonderful one—she hasn't even been awake for ten minutes and already she's lamenting the loss!—and enough leverage for her to open her mind to the possibilities.

He's still got her hand clasped in his. Tony holds it in one palm and presses his other on top of it, his semi-rough hands warm over her cold one. Although she doesn't want to meet his eyes, Pepper does and sees again the level of guilt that he's been through.

"Talk to me," she says.

Tony sighs, his thumb running along the top of her wrist as he contemplates his plan. "They say that with therapy, there's a small chance that you can walk again. I for one don't believe it, not with the nerve damage. So we have two options here, Potts." He squints at her and she raises her eyebrows. "One: I've been making a—well, we'll call it a booster shot for now—and from what I can tell, it should be able to heal and stimulate the damaged tissue, fixing it like new. If we couple that with therapy, then I don't see why you wouldn't be back on your feet in, oh, six months or so."

"Six _months?_"

"Yep. And here's the other option: if you want to be up and about before that, I can design you a customized sort of brace that would act as a pair of makeshift legs. They'd be streamline and essentially invisible under a pair of pants, but they're not a permanent fix, and I'd be just heartbroken if you never wore a skirt again."

Pepper makes a skeptical noise at his joke. Tony doesn't crack a smile. "Why wouldn't we go with the brace?" she asks.

"Because by itself it would take three months to make, postponing your actual recovery time to almost a year. And even after that, you'd still need therapy and all that crazy stuff, so I figured maybe we'd just skip the replacement and go right for the big project."

He's talking in that way he does when designing the Iron Man, and she's not so sure she likes the way it sounds. Pepper feels like one of his science projects, like an invention. Maybe it's just the way Tony always talks when in this circumstance—it wouldn't be the first time she's been affected by one of his inventions, and probably not the last time, either. Biting her lip, Pepper turns her head away from Tony and his piercing stare.

The room is bland, but there's an air of hominess that she can't help but admire. It could be the picture of flowers on the wall, or the quilted blanket somebody has left folded at the foot of her bed. When she turns towards the window, she's surprised to see a small table covered in cards and flowers and what appears to be a small mountain of chocolate. She stares.

"Is that all for me?" she asks.

Tony follows her gaze to the table. "Yup. Gifts from friends and family and… people from the organization. Spider Man felt so bad about his villain attacking you that he wrote an apology letter and made a vase of flowers out of webbing."

"How lovely," she deadpans, but with a small smile. Tearing her eyes from the flower and card-filled table, Pepper turns back to her boss. "How publicized was all of this?"

"Well," begins Tony, "You're my PA, and I'm one of the most famous men in the world. What do you think?"

The small, unpleasant jolt in her side (it could just be the injuries, but she doesn't think so) reminds her exactly who she is. Pepper Potts, the famous Personal Assistant of the biggest genius in the world. The public was probably just surprised that he hadn't been able to wake her up sooner. Whenever sooner even was. Then it also dawns on her that Tony isn't exactly her next of kin. She feels a flash of panic, her eyes widening behind the lenses of her glasses (oh how she already misses her contact lenses).

"Have you spoken with my family about any of this?" she asks.

Pepper is almost afraid to hear the answer. One of the reasons she has been so successful in her career—the very reason she shipped herself off to California in the first place—is because being around her basket case mother and nearly psychotic sister can give her a headache in thirty seconds flat. Tony knows this, and while he's only had to deal with them about three times in all their time as diligent PA and promiscuous boss, those times have been enough. The look that flashes over his face gives her enough of an answer.

"Please don't tell me they're in Malibu, Tony."

He nods in grave affirmation. "They've been here for three weeks, and I've therefore been avoiding them for three weeks. Unfortunately, they know just as well as I do that I'm to blame for all of this—"

Pepper tries to cut across his self-accusation with a gentle "Tony", but he plows right through her excuses.

"—and so they won't let me near your medical records, not even when I offered them a whole lot of money. Since they're in charge of all your stuff, and will be until you're deemed 'mentally stable', neither of us is getting any of those files."

"Meaning what, exactly?" Oh how she hates not being in the loop, the center of things. It's going to take her months to catch up on all the work. The thought of opening her inbox is enough to make her feel faint, never mind with all this added stress and Tony's cryptic talk. And what's this about being "mentally stable"? Despite the physical pain, she feels nothing more than a nagging sense of terror. Very human, very stable terror.

"Meaning that I need to do everything from scratch." Tony leans in so that he can drop his voice to a soft murmur. "I need blood work, scans, medical history, the whole nine yards, and they're not going to give me any of it. So here's the catch." He pauses for a split second, and she can't help but notice the subtle humor behind the seriousness of his face. "While I'm working on this whole project, it would be easier if you just crashed at my place."

This time her eyebrows nearly shoot off her face and he does grin. "You want me to move in with you?"

"I thought you'd never ask."

Pepper gives an exasperated sigh as Tony stands from his spot on the bed. "Tony, I'm not sure that's app—"

He's not listening, but then again, he never does. By the time she's managed to get over the initial surprise, Tony's clapped her on the shoulder (she winces slightly as her side gives a pang of objection) and is making his way towards the door.

"I've already taken the liberty of moving your essentials over to my Malibu place," says Tony all too casually, grabbing the doorhandle and giving it a turn. "As soon as you've got the clear, which should be soon, we can get you home and get us started."

"Tony—"

"But seriously, Potts." He lets the door close again and strides over to her bedside. Dropping to his previous spot on the bed, he grabs her hand again and peers into her eyes with the sort of intensity that makes her very nervous, causes her to shrink back against her white pillows. "I did this to you, and I'm going to make it right. I promise you. It won't be pleasant, but if it's the last thing I do, you'll be back to normal."

As he begins to take his leave, Pepper is struck by a thought so out of place that she can't help but mention it. "Hey, boss?"

Tony turns around in the doorway with one hand stuffed in his pocket and the other on the doorhandle.

"Did you make it to the meeting?"

He smiles. "I was late and beside myself by the time I got there, but the arrangements were made."

"Good."

Then he's gone again, out the door as quickly as if he'd just vanished on the spot. Silence falls on Pepper in the room, where she sits all alone with only half the information she'd like and a whole lot of confusion.

There's a knot in her throat, but she wills herself not to cry. Tony will take care of it like he always does, and she'll go back to her normal life in no time. Pepper takes a deep breath, looks at her (useless) legs, and in one fluid motion pulls the sheet back over them so that she doesn't have to look any longer.

xXx

The next few days are a blur of doctors and medications and evaluations and pretending to sleep whenever her mother and sister come to call. The only time she feels lucid is after the doctors and nurses have left and it's just her and Tony. This feeling is a dual-edged sword, for as much as she wants to keep her relationship with him as professional as possible, she _is_ going to be living with him for the next few months, so she figures she might as well get used to spending more time than usual with him. For the most part, the only thing that bothers Pepper about it is the inevitable barrage of tabloid writers that are going to write nasty things about her. For so long she's managed to keep them out of her personal life, but now… well, it's only a matter of time until people find out, and then her reputation as the unflinchingly professional PA will be ruined.

She hasn't cried yet, either. Tony hasn't said anything, but she can tell he's just waiting for her to explode. She even _feels _like a ticking bomb. The first time the doctors raised her to her feet and tried to see if she could walk, she ended up slipping from their not-so-steady hands to land on the floor with her hospital gown up around her rear end. As humiliated as she feels every time they do a test, Pepper can't help but simultaneously be thankful that Tony's been there every step of the way. He protests every time they kick him out of the room to do tests (he's not even allowed to be on-sight after visiting hours, but she has an aching suspicion that he's bribed half of the hospital into letting him stay until well past midnight), he brings her the newspaper every morning before he heads off to work (he's actually on time for work now, and that scares her almost more than her injuries). His unflinching support is borderline nerve-wracking, since Pepper knows that it's in part because he feels so guilty about landing her here. And he hasn't even seen most of the damage. If he were to see the bruises all along his midriff, he might just faint. Sometimes she feels as if she's been locked away in a cage, only even there to be poked and prodded by doctors. Tony might even be a preferred option.

So when she finally gets the OK to leave ("As long as you come back for weekly checkups," the doctor reminds her), Pepper is all too thrilled. The morning of her departure, Rhodey shows up and shares the free breakfast, seated with a tray of hospital food balanced on his knees. The Air Force has kept him too busy to come every day, but she's enjoyed his presence when he has time to grace her with it. When he leaves, it's with a word of good luck and a friendly "Don't let Tony push you around too much".

Pepper can't tell if he's being serious, or if he's making a pun because she's going to be wheelchair bound for the next six months or so. She has a suspicion that it's some sort of combination. Nevertheless, when Tony arrives later in the afternoon with Happy and, much to their dismay, Pepper's sister and mother, she's in surprisingly high spirits. Her clothes have been washes and pressed, and this morning she's able to force herself into her signature pencil skirt without help from any of the aids. The prospect of fresh air is wonderful in itself, and even more wonderful is the thought of taking a shower without a nurse there to ogle at her (Tony had volunteered to help her with that, but she'd politely declined). After being more or less mauled by her family with hugs that stab her broken ribs, she sidles into the wheelchair and Tony pushes her outside with a word of warning: "Brace yourself, Potts."

"What for?" she asks.

He doesn't answer.

Any joy she might have felt at finally being outside is quickly stifled by the mob of reporters that have rallied just outside the hospital property. Now Happy and the other guards' presence becomes clear; apparently the press hasn't been allowed on the property of Malibu Memorial, and had thus camped out all day to get the first shots of her resurfacing into the real world. Amidst the camera flashes and shouted questions Pepper feels a little more than overwhelmed, but Tony never ceases his slow but steady progress towards the Audi. One of the reporters goes as far as to leap in front of her wheelchair and shove the microphone of his camera in her face, but she is able to evade him long enough for Happy to forcibly remove him from her face. Once they've reached the car, Tony lifts her from the chair and plunks her down in the backseat before folding the chair and shoving it into the trunk. Then, once he's sat down beside her and Happy's taken his position at the driver's seat, they're off.

Pepper hasn't been in a car since her less-than-successful trip, and she fumbles with the seatbelt with shaking fingers for a good ten seconds before she's finally able to snap it into place. She can feel Tony's eyes on her the whole time, speculating, observing. Neither of them says a word the whole ride to Tony's place, but luckily Happy puts on some loud music only a few minutes after starting the car, giving them an excuse not to speak. Pepper wonders if Tony is at all nervous about having her live in his home, or if he's as afraid as she is that something will go horribly wrong with this experiment and kill either one or both of them. He's no doctor, after all, and though he's a genius she can't help but feel somewhat uncertain at the idea of him giving her a needle. Biting her bottom lip, she rests her head on the window and watches as the California scenery unfolds around her for the first time in almost a month.

When she rolls herself into the front door, Jarvis greets her in his pleasantly robotic way and lets her know that he's thrilled to have her hard drive programmed into his system. As it turns out, Tony's turned the sitting room into a workable office for his—dare she think it? _Disabled_—assistant. There's a lovely mahogany desk with all of her supplies, computer, and file cabinets strategically placed so that she can access it from her chair.

"Impressive, isn't it?" He's obviously very pleased with himself, so Pepper lets him enjoy his admittedly stylish setup. "Just wait till you see your room."

Oh boy.

The biggest wrench for Pepper, as far as moving into Tony's place is concerned, is that she was actually quite attached to her little apartment before the accident. Knowing Tony, he's probably made some sort of grand penthouse suite for her, complete with indoor swimming pool and floating mattress. Her fingers, now freshly polished a light shade of red, clench around the arm rests of her wheelchair. Tony steps behind her and takes the handles of the chair, pushing her past the sitting room-office combination through the adjacent doorway. Pepper holds her breath, waiting for the inevitable extravagance, and then…

"Oh—wow."

"You like it?"

"I—yes. It's lovely. Thank you."

And indeed it is. Whether on a whim or because he really knows her, her bedroom is both simple and stunning in nature, and somehow bears a startling resemblance to her old apartment. The furniture is more modern, as per usual in Tony's house, but there's nothing too wild about it. Pepper feels that golf ball in her throat once more and, horrified, swallows it down before he has a chance to notice her glassy eyes. She was able to keep her composure when he returned from the dead, so she will do the same now. The overwhelmingness of it all, coupled with her various medications beginning to wane and her determination not to shed any tears over herself, is almost more than she could take in this short span of time. Almost.

"Come on, we've got to start on those scans."

"Wonderful. Could I just check my email first?"

"Sure. Hey Jarvis, load Pepper's inbox for me." Tony rolls her backwards out of the door, straightens out, and starts for the elevator.

A moment later, Jarvis' automated voice announces that Pepper currently has five thousand, three hundred fifty two unread messages and Pepper, groaning, announces that she's changed her mind about tackling the emails. On that note, Tony puts the pair of them in the elevator and together they head down to the garage, which has not changed a bit since the last time she saw it. It still houses the same computers, the same Mark 6 Iron Man suit up on its rack, the same coffee mug (probably filled with the same coffee, knowing Tony). The only difference is in the corner of the room, where what looks like a circular mat is plugged into a number of computers. Beside it, with a few feet of walking space in every direction, is the sort of examination table Tony had been lying on when Pepper had stuck her hand into his chest all that time ago. He observes that she has noticed this new equipment and makes a casual gesture to it with the back of his hand.

"My medical laboratory," he notes with the air of one discussing the news. "Totally state-of-the-art and ready for use."

She tilts her head back to get a better look at him from where he stands behind her. "Are you sure it's safe?"

"Totally. Well, ninety percent sure. There's always room for improvement."

When Pepper cannot being herself to reply, he laughs and wheels her over to the bench. With seemingly no effort at all he hoists her onto the bench, grinning further when she gives a small shriek of surprise at the gesture. Though Pepper has been knowingly paralyzed for several days now, not being able to feel his hands gripping the underside of her knees still makes her feel queasy every time. Since she cannot even use her legs to sit upright on the bench, Tony has apparently fixed a handlebar on either side of her so that she can hold herself up when her legs need to dangle off the edge of the bench.

Sitting there and gripping the bars for dear life, Pepper watches Tony bustle around his garage and feels distinctly like a twelve-year-old girl sitting in the doctor's office. Only instead of a doctor she's watching her notoriously unstable boss as he grabs a notepad, sticks a pencil behind his ear, and fastens a leather utility belt around his waist. Instead of a white lab jacket and gloves he's wearing faded jeans and a designer jacket, which he unbuttons and pulls off to reveal a black wife beater. The only reassuring thing that Pepper can see is the steady glow of the Arc Reactor beneath the cotton of his shirt, the sure sign that he actually knows what he's doing.

"Ready, Potts?" he asks, stepping forward and pulling from his utility belt one of those instruments used to test reflexes.

Pepper responds with a very strained, tight-lipped smile that he notices without expression. However, he is seemingly unperturbed by the gesture and goes about with his makeshift physical, tapping her knees, ankles, and bare feet with the instrument that she can neither feel nor respond to. Tony takes notes as he goes about his work, whistling to himself some rock song that she doesn't recognize. When he's finished with the reflex hammer, he peers into her eyes and ears with the lighted instrument she can't name, takes her blood pressure ("Geez Pep, is my presence really making your heart beat that fast?") and presses the stethoscope against the back of her shirt to listen to her breathing.

Next he grabs the notepad from the bench. "Any previous injuries?" he asks.

"No."

"History of medical complications in the family?"

"Not that I'm aware of, no."

"Are you sexually active?"

"_Tony—_"

Tony hold up the clipboard so that she can see the printed sheet of questions. "Hey, it's all on the notes. I stole it from your Doc."

She sighs, rolls her blue eyes towards the ceiling. "Not at the moment."

"What a shame," he mutters, shaking his head. Pepper chooses not to comment, although the slight color in her cheeks probably speaks for both of them.

Pepper's arms have begun to ache from holding herself up. It's little things like these that strike her the hardest. Having to take over an hour to shower, needing to force her legs into her slacks and putting ridiculous heels on even though she knows she won't be walking any time soon—when pilled on top of one another like that, the issues are devastating. What if the treatment fails and she's left like this forever, dependant upon a caretaker until she inevitably dies from complication?

Pepper, who rarely goes a day without a jog, who has always taken the utmost pride in her independence and success, is suddenly overcome with a horrible sense of hopelessness.

To her horror, she feels her throat beginning to close again. She takes a deep breath to stifle the hiccup of a sob threatening to escape from her chest and prays that Tony doesn't notice. He does. Luckily, he seems to think that the calming breath is a reaction to his touch on her arm.

"My hands too cold?" he asks, looking up from his notepad with a hint of concern.

She shakes her head, biting her lip. If she speaks she might actually have a breakdown, and that would just be unacceptable. Her job is to be solid, if not for herself than for Tony, who depends on her more than some spouses depend on one another. Yet at the same time there are a thousand questions pulsating in her head, each one more disturbed than the next, wanting to be asked.

Tony straightens up from his notepad. Sticking the pencil behind his ear, he reaches into his back pocket and draws forth yet another instrument. This one she doesn't recognize from anywhere in particular—it almost looks like some sort of thick pen—but a moment later he's clicked it and pressed it against the base of her ribcage. A buzzing sensation floods the spot, seeming to travel up her sternum, and then is gone.

"What's it look like, Jarvis?" asks Tony to the ceiling.

Jarvis responds in his typical manner, "According to my scan, Sir: ten left, eight and seven right."

"You are brilliant." Tony then turns to Pepper. "Did you know that you have three broken ribs, Pepper?"

"I—no, well…" Her voice drops off in a waver, and she is still too on the verge of tears to speak clearly. Finally she clears her throat and is able to answer: "I can feel it, you know."

_One of the only things I _can_ feel_, the nagging part of her subconscious is quick to reply.

Ah, that downward spiral of despair. She's clinging as fast as she can to the last of her resolve, but it's breaking apart beneath her fingers. The last straw breaks only when Tony pockets the scanner and sets two fingers against one of her broken ribs, his other hand cradling her waist from the opposite side.

Three weeks ago she would never have let him touch her like this, not even in a professional, medical sense. Now she can say nothing against it, can neither think of a snappy comment nor fight him off if she wanted to. She doesn't even _want_ to. As far as Pepper can tell, she doesn't want to do anything. She's lost more than she can handle.

He steps away from the table to get a better look at her glassy eyes, his fingers already tugging at the spot where her shirt is tucked into her skirt. The look in his eyes is purely scientific, not the slightest bit dubious, and she already knows where he's going with this. "May I?"

Pepper sighs and nods. He takes this as incentive to ease his left hand up underneath the spot of her blouse he's already pulled away from the waistband of her skirt. Ever the focused man, he doesn't stray from the path to the base of her ribcage, nor does he venture away once he finds one of the ribs aforementioned by Jarvis. Pepper feels distinctly as if she's in some sort of middle school fantasy—in any other circumstance at all, this might have been comical, but not now. The tension between them isn't sexual so much as it is somber. At least his hands are warm, she thinks blankly.

Tony runs his fingers along the broken rib until he finds the point of fracture, at which point he nods to himself and presses gently against it with his forefinger. In turn, a horrible shooting pain cuts through her side and into her lungs, causing her fingers to clench over the support bars and a small gasp to escape from her mouth. Tony draws back his hand so fast that he nearly stumbles backwards into the computer. He says something superficial like "easy now, Potts", something she doesn't hear nor care to hear. Three weeks' worth of frustration has reached its boiling point and she's losing her composure, fast. It doesn't help that her arms feel as though they might fall off from sustaining her weight.

"Ah Pep, don't dissolve on me now," he starts, but it's too late.

She can feel the long-awaited tears welling up in her eyes and sliding down her face, first one at a time and then in a stream of salty-tasting water. Part of her is screaming for her to get a grip on herself, but the other half just keeps telling her to let it go. She might feel better afterward.

Tony, on the other hand, is feeling no confliction. Grabbing her by the shoulders, he begins to talk to her in what he must think is a reassuring voice, telling her not to worry.

Pepper is on the brink of sobbing and can only manage to choke out, "I can't do this" before she's rendered incoherent. Her hands lose their grip on the bars and she, with no power over her own body and no back support, begins to fall forward. Tony catches her against his chest, the pencil falling from behind his ear to the floor at the sudden movement. She makes a desperate grab for the bars again but only succeeds in grabbing one.

"Shh…" His voice catches, but other than that he shows no sign of emotion. The guilt at her words has begun to bubble up in his chest as it did during her weeks of unconsciousness. Pepper doesn't deserve this. She never deserved anything than the best, and his irrational behavior ultimately caused her downfall. "Pepper, don't say that. I know you can do this."

Her face pressed into the joint of his shoulder, Pepper gasps, "_How_, Tony? I'm—I feel so h-helpless."

"Shh, it's okay. Let go, I've got you."

Pepper releases the bar from her white-knuckled grip and allows Tony to hold her upright where she sits, crying and feeling more ashamed and relieved than she has since she woke up. He smells like clean soap and a hint of subtle cologne, the smell encompassing her, urging her already conflicted being. The steady beat of his pulse thrums in her ear like a metronome. Her tears have stained his beater a dark shade of black, but he doesn't mind. From where he stands with one hand around her slender waist and the other pressing her head to his shoulder, Tony doesn't mind anything but the fact that he's the one who brought this upon her in the first place. If she wants to have a small breakdown, he's not going to stop her. Purge the tears, recover, and move on.

It's what he did after her accident. After he wasn't quick enough.

Now closing his own eyes against the shame, Tony rests his cheek on the top of Pepper's head and gives a shaky sigh. The workshop is filled with the sounds of her quiet tears, but for tonight, that is enough.

Because Pepper, as beaten and sad as she is, is still alive.

* * *

A/n: Oh the drama of Iron Man. This chapter was a pain in the arse because it was a transitional one, but I hope to get into more of the good ol' character business in the next chapter.

Thanks for reading!


	4. Reflection

A/n: Yeah, hey... so once again, I am without excuse except for a busy life and lack of willpower. But... enjoy anyway! Eheh...

Disclaimer: I own nothing.

Happy Reading!

* * *

_IV. Reflection_

He refuses to admit that his frequent check-ups on Pepper are anything but medically-concerned. Every so often, Tony sets down the wrench he's using for the latest Stark Industries project, creeps silently over to the bottom of the stairs, and uses his surveillance camera to watch her in hi-definition on a little monitor. While he would most likely be able to charm any onlooker into believing that this viewing session is a mere way of ensuring that she's not experiencing side effects to the latest booster, Tony has had a hard time convincing himself of anything of the sort. It could be that these so-called "checkups" are occurring about every ten minutes, or that if he doesn't take a look at that flatscreen mini-TV every so often his palms begin to sweat.

But if nothing else, he refuses to call it spying. Spying is juvenile and he's twelve years too old to be playing these stupid games. Then again, as Pepper would probably point out with a little smirk turned in the corner of her mouth, he's probably too old to be bringing countless visitors over to his less-than-humble abode and leaving them to fend for themselves in the morning. Of course, he hasn't done that for so long now that it seems like that whole part of his life might have taken place twelve years ago.

Tony sighs and tears his eyes from the picture on the screen, which displays a live feed of Pepper from where she sits in her new office, her laptop perched on her thighs and a morning cup of coffee steaming on the nearby table. Although nobody is going to see her but him, she's still showered and dressed for work, prim and proper with her hair fastened back in a no-nonsense bun. She's even wearing those stilettos, he notices with an inward groan. Old habits die hard as a general rule, and for Pepper they're not going anywhere fast. So what if she's hopped up on more pain medications than he cares to count, or that she's been subjected to his probing on almost a daily basis for the last week? Her inbox is now as tidy as ever, the most important files are printed and stacked neatly on her desk, complete with an array of lemon yellow sticky notes. It's impressive, nearing borderline insanity. Tony could eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Strumming a nameless tune on his arc reactor, Tony makes his way through the bombsite of his garage like a dredge until he finds the stack of folders labeled in his scrawl "Long-Term Rehab". Tentatively he plucks one up, opens it, and sighs at the consequential puzzle within. His first attempt at creating an effective booster had nearly melted its test tube and the rest of his desk. The second one had been less dramatic; in fact, once he'd finally decided that it was good for use and gave his hindered assistant a dose of it, there was no reaction at all. The scans showed nothing more irregular than a slightly high blood pressure for the day, and then all was normal.

It's no wonder her crazy mother won't let him near her files, he thinks. While he always has a solid grip on what he's doing, not even the hypotheses of Tony Stark are flawless. Sometimes the reaction is catastrophic, other times there is no reaction at all. Luckily, in this case the latter is true. He's also made the decision not to tell Pepper about his miscalculation. As if she's not already stressed to bursting point (she may not look like it, but he just knows she is), the news that his math was actually wrong could bring about another meltdown, and they just don't need that.

Not that he had minded holding her like that during her little epiphany, not in the slightest. Quite the contrary, beneath all the guilt and sorrow of the situation, there had been a portion of him doing somersaults at the very prospect of touching the untouchable Pepper Pots, never mind actually holding her sobbing form to his chest. Tony tears his eyes from the folder for a few moments to savor the memory as it sits fresh in his mind. Can he still feel her quivering shoulder below his palm—? Wait for it… Yes, yes he can. Every little detail remains embossed in the forefront of his mind, not so much the sorrow as the song of it all beneath the distress. For a few precious moments, she had trusted him, even only if it were because she could go nowhere else. And that is what he had sort of been looking for; just a little bit of trust, and Tony knows he can fix her right.

Still, his math had been wrong. And if he wanted to take it a step further, he could go as far back as the accident itself and say that his miscalculations had brought him here in the first place. He can't expect someone as headstrong (and crazy) as Pepper's mother to cooperate if he can't even get his own act together. With a sigh, Tony takes the manila folder over to the couch and plunks himself down with it in his open palms. Here, by definition of the medical world, is the essence of Virginia Potts. Full body scans, medical history, the works. The only thing he doesn't have is the procedure immediately following the incident—the steps that the big boys over at Malibu Memorial took to put Pepper back together—and the accompanying X-rays, scans, and tests results from that vital time period. All of that he's had to somehow make his way around, and though it hasn't been easy, he's making progress.

If only Pepper's mother—named Theresa, ironically enough—hadn't been so steadfast.

Tony sighs. The conversation is not one he likes to dwell on, but it happens every time he looks with doubt upon his makeshift profile.

_"Please, Mrs. Potts, if I could get this vital information, I can get to work on a remedy. Just think! In less than a year, Pepper—Virginia, rather—can be on a pair of fully functional legs. Isn't that what you want?"_

_Theresa appeared little more than affronted by his approach. "If I had it my way, my daughter would never see your face again," she said. "It's your fault she's like this, and quite frankly, I'm surprised you're not in jail. I don't care what the official statement is; all I know is that my daughter is permanently disabled because of your 'body guard' or whatever the hell you call it."_

_"Not permanently—"_

_"Yes permanently! I may not have control over who she sees or who she works with, but you can be damn sure that I will not be helping you in any way."_

_Tony struggled for a few moments to regain his voice. She seemed to have knocked the breath right out of him without ever raising a fist. Finally, when he did, he began to argue once more. "This isn't about me, Mrs. Potts. It's about your daughter, and the quality of her life. Even if you believe that I am at fault for all of this, it would be crazy not to let me at least try to fix the error."_

_She laughed coldly (Where the Pepper get her wonderful disposition? he wondered). "But it is about you, Tony Stark. And I'm not letting you touch those files, not for all the money in the world. The less my daughter has to do with you, the better off we'll all be."_

Tony heaves a long sigh, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. If she's so crazy, then why can't he convince himself that she's wrong?

_Because it is your fault, that's why._

He keeps telling himself not to talk or think like that. If anything, it's making him counter-productive and right now he can't afford to be anything but focused. Tony raises his head from the files.

"Hey Jarvis, can we get a time check in here?"

"It's nine-thirty, Sir. Shall I start the car for you?"

"You're a doll. I'll be up in a minute."

Grabbing the file folder in one hand, he rises from the sagging couch cushion and finds his way back over to the workbench. The array of junk littered everywhere is borderline unmanageable—if Pepper were to see it, she might pass out, but luckily she's taken to paging him from her office. He actually answers the call now instead of just cranking the music up louder; she had been very impressed the first time his voice had been on the receiving end of her line instead of the usual pointed silence. Tony tosses the folder down on top of the medical bench, takes a look around at the explosion that is his garage before shooting the robot in the corner a sharp glare.

"I'm feeling inspired by this catastrophe. Dummy, clean this up, would you?" He jerks his head towards the largest pile of paperwork. Life without Pepper hasn't been the most organized, especially not the first week or so. He had… let himself go, for a few days, and since then he's been struggling to pick up the pieces. "I want everything alphabetized by the time I get home, or at least put into nice little piles."

The robot springs to life at once, scurrying around a pile of tools to reach the aforementioned mountain of paper. There will, more likely than not, be some sort of drawback to this less-than-hands-on approach that he will surely walk right into later, but it's at least a start. Tony surveys his robot's progress for a minute or so before he turns around and bounds up the stairs.

ooo

"Alright Miss Potts, I'm out of here."

Tony strides into the room in the most casual of his designer business suits, adjusting the cuff of his sleeve with his usual brisk air. Pepper takes the time to close her laptop before acknowledging him, and as he watches her he gets the feeling that maybe she isn't so 'on edge' after all. Smiling as she looks up at him, she reaches over and grabs her trusty leather-bound notebook from the edge of the mahogany desk. A pair of delicate wire treble clefs dangle from her ears, her bangs sit just right across her forehead. Oh Pepper, always the businesswoman, straight-backed and beautiful. It drives him nearly mad, but he covers up the initial burst of appreciation for her taste in details with a very small smile.

"What's the low-down?"

Pepper jumps without hesitation into her explanation of his day, her nimble fingers leaping towards her blackberry where it is perched on the armrest of her wheel chair. Ever since he dug it out from beneath the seat of his car and gave it back to her, she's barely let it out of her sight. The damn thing might as well be her firstborn.

"You've got a twelve and a six-o-clock with the promotional unit and the board, respectively. If Jackson's going to be there then you might want to double-check the Industrial Average stats, just to be safe, because he's always right on top of it. If you want, I can keep track and then call you right before the meeting."

She speaks in that calm, businesslike manner that suggests she's got everything under control, cool and collected on her blackberry. As she speaks she simultaneously jots the information down on a page in her notebook, Tony watching the ink of her pen curve into neat letters on the Stark Industries paper (economy brand, absolutely no lines). Tony, having finished fixing his sleeve, shoves one hand in his pocket and reaches over to take the slip of paper she's tearing from the notepad.

"Jackson's gonna be a no go, I think," says Tony, folding the note into quarters. "In fact, if he shows up I'll be… I think 'dead surprised' is a sufficiently ironic term."

Pepper's eyebrows rise at his comment and she opens her laptop, undoubtedly in search of the change of plans. Tony can count on one hand the number of times he's caught her off guard when business—specifically, board meetings—is the subject matter. He half expects her to have more of a reaction than a simple look of surprised curiosity, but she seems a whole lot more puzzled than ruffled by the revelation. She grabs up her blackberry and takes a good look at the screen, as if she half expects it to ring at the gesture. When it doesn't, she pokes at the little screen with her index finger, its desktop glowing white in her hand.

"Did he call? I didn't get the email, unless I misfiled it—"

"Uh, actually he's dead." She looks up in surprise at his calm comment. Tony continues, outwardly unperturbed while on the inside he's trying to remember the last time this role-reversal has taken place. "Yeah, he had a massive heart attack a few weeks ago—betterment of mankind if you ask me; he was one loopy son of a bitch. Thought he was going to propose to the market or something."

"Wow. I seem to have missed that memo. Are there any other dead board members I should be worried about?"

"Not unless today goes really badly, although in that case you'd be in charge of all my services and would therefore be writing said memos, not reading them. But Jackson's death was really well-publicized on all the mass media. There wouldn't have been a memo or even a cancellation notice. It's not like he's running the meeting. I don't suppose they took your… leave of absence into… account." His voice dwindles as it tends to do when he lapses into a train of thought. The board should probably have been a little more understanding (or at least realistic) anyway, and he makes a mental note to comment this to the remaining members. When Pepper says nothing in response, her eyebrows still aloft and those earrings swinging gently about her jawbone, he adds, "I hope you haven't been leaving him frantic messages or anything."

"No…"

"Good. Then I'm out of here. Help yourself to the house as usual, but don't unplug anything. Do you want me to grab anything from your office while I'm poking around over there?" Pepper shakes her head. "Cool. I'll grab a pizza or something on the way home."

"Oh—actually, Tony," she begins, closing her laptop again in order to reach across and grab one of the many papers from her desk. "I was going to try to cook… something."

Now it is Tony who finds himself surprised. He tucks into his pocket the neatly-folded schedule that Pepper has handed him before he takes the next sheet of paper. Her bright eyes are on him like glue as he reads over the recipe for what is apparently called "Chicken a la Chive". He hasn't got a clue what it is, but it's probably a whole lot better than pizza and, for Christ's sake, if Pepper wants to cook for him then he's not going to stop her. Tony looks at his waiting PA over the top of the paper.

"Why Miss Potts, I didn't know you could cook," he says with polite interest.

She offers him a sort of forced smile. "Oh, I don't. Hence the 'try' part."

Shrugging, he passes the recipe back into her expectantly-poised hand and backs off a step. "Should I get Dummy up here with the fire extinguisher?"

"No, I don't think that will be necessary."

"I certainly hope not." Another backwards step, inching towards the door with the sort of awkward hesitation they've both grown accustomed to since her move-in. "I'll call you before the meetings."

"Good luck, Tony."

"Adieu, Pepper."

ooo

The house is still in tact when Tony rolls his remaining Audi (they've taken a considerable amount of abuse from the Iron Man, the poor darlings) into the garage, though as he ascends the stairs there is most definitely a hint of a burning smell in the air. And sure enough, he finds Pepper in the kitchen, seated upon one of the table chairs with her wheelchair close by and an open pizza box on the counter.

"Don't say a word," she warns with a smirk.

Tony grins, already making his way towards the counter, where she's left two paper plates and two wine glasses. "I was actually going to groan in exasperation, but I figure you'd still get the message." Tony grabs the wine glasses and carries them across to the rarely-used table, and sets them down before his PA. "And what will the lovely Pepper Potts be drinking tonight?"

"Considering all the medications I'm on—both prescribed and experimental—water would probably be the best option."

"Would you care for some olives in that water?"

She almost laughs, but manages to stifle the sound behind a soft chuckle. "If it makes you feel better, olives would be lovely."

A few minutes and a wrestling match with one jar of olives later, Tony and Pepper are sitting across from one another at the dinner table. They chat over the warm pizza and drinks (oh how he loves scotch and pizza). Pepper talks about her day and its various happenings, from the angry email she received from the propositions board to the letter Jarvis had found at the door, which had been written by a woman claiming Tony to be the father of her unborn child ("Well, that'd be an interesting plot twist," he jokes through a mouthful of melted cheese and pepperoni). Tony is only half-listening, more often than not with his glass pressed to his mouth. The day has been a good one for marveling, if nothing else. At work, he'd actually managed to stay focused long enough to deal with the meetings—which he'd nailed, incidentally—and even get some paperwork done on the project Stark Industries had unveiled in the wake of his ever-reminiscent press conference episode, from which the stocks still haven't fully recovered. He spends a lot of his time contemplating the nature of business and the fact that he now knows his own PIN number, usually while bent over some enormous stack of paperwork that he had once left all to Pepper. And when he's not actively working, Tony keeps drifting back into his dungeon-like imagination, marveling that Pepper is lucky to be alive and he's lucky to still have her, whether she's sitting in his office at headquarters or at his kitchen table. The latter is the more inviting of the two scenarios by far.

Nevertheless, as he sits there with a strong of mozzarella dangling from his chin and Pepper talking as open and comfortably as if they're married—okay, married is a bit of a stretch, but they've been on good terms since the accident and that is one hell of a start—he can't help but wonder what will happen once (if) she's gotten back on her feet. Will she simply just go back to her apartment on the other side of town, on which he's paid her rent regardless of whether or not she plans to go back, and act as if they never shared this dinner together? Or any dinner, for that matter. Pre-accident Pepper for some reason didn't much like eating around him, preferring to run out for lunch and of course never accept any dinner invitations unless at least two hundred other people were going to be there. The thought almost makes his scowl, but instead Tony reaches across the table to fill his empty glass.

Tony can't believe he's become so accustomed to Pepper's presence around the house, although she used to spend quite a lot of time here anyway. If he had been expecting anything in his life as a bachelor, it wasn't that he'd actually find someone who he enjoys being around all the time.

"Tony—?"

It's his secretary, too! For the sake of all things rum-filled and chocolatey, he could have at least picked someone that makes him feel less like a Bill Clinton wannabe. Then again, Clinton had been married and Tony's office is certainly not oval-shaped. Besides, these days he's more likely to find her typing away in his sitting room than at the Stark Industries main site; he tries to give her the space he knows she likes when she's getting her work done. That's why he surveys (it's not spying) her quietly from his monitoring system downstairs.

You know, just in case something happens to her and he's in the garage and out of earshot.

Sometimes Tony thinks he's becoming paranoid.

"Tony, you've got sauce all over yourself."

This little quip brings Tony sharply back to the present, where he finds Pepper peering exasperatedly at him. Upon further inspection, he discovers that in his daydreaming, half the cheese from his pizza slice has dropped onto his lap.

"Whoops," he says, looking down to assess the damage. Nothing a little extra detergent can't fix. Tony determines that no irrevocable damage has been done and gingerly lifts the cheese from his lap between his thumb and forefinger.

Pepper looks at her boss and sighs. Some things don't change, or at least they require more time. Tony, for the foreseeable future, will most likely continue his habit of not listening to a word she says. He offers her what may or may not be a scotch-induced grin. She rolls her eyes.

ooo

Whether by the pizza toppings or because the booster shot is finally starting to kick in, Pepper finds herself plagued by an awful nightmare:

The day is thus far eventless other than a few calls from a few unhappy board members. Pepper sits in her wheelchair by her desk, her computer on her lapdesk as always and a steady stream of emails already beginning to fill her morning inbox. For some reason, when she climbed out of bed this morning, she'd taken one look at her professional outfit and groaned in dismay. Thus, she's still wearing the fuzzy red bathrobe that clashes magnificently with her hair. Her feet are bare, but in her paralysis she doesn't feel the need to dress them in socks; they're not going to get cold, so why bother? Tony's not here, either. She assumes that he has just run off to work without telling her, and though this thought makes her unhappy, it's not as if he needs to report to her, or that he has to. It's his house, after all, and she's just a visitor of sorts.

Pepper has just sighed and leaned her head back against the wheelchair's headrest when her blackberry rings in her bathrobe pocket (When did I put it in there, anyway?). She scoots over to better thrust her hand into her pocket, draws it forth with only some difficulty, and looks at the little screen.

Unknown caller, unknown number. Somewhat hesitantly, she answers it, her brows furrowing.

"Hello?"

First she's greeted by an array of static, and then the line cuts off into a dial tone. Puzzled, she pulls the phone away from her ear to look at it. No image, no light, no nothing. As far as she can see, her phone has just shut off of its own accord. Stupid thing—it's probably got some latent defect from rolling around under the seat of Tony's car for so long. She digs her fingernail into the little rubber "on" button to no avail. It could be the battery, but it doesn't usually just die like this—

A loud slam interrupts her thoughts. It sounds as if someone were standing on the upper floor of the house and dropped a couch onto the wooden deck below. Whatever it is, it's obviously bigger than anything that should be falling from the sky. Pepper, dropping her phone in surprise as she jumps from the unexpected noise, spins her wheelchair around. Just outside the glass doors of the back desk is the source of the noise. What looks like a heap of metal on the ground has evidently fallen and landed on the deck, cracking it down the center so that the entire wooden structure is curved inwards like a bowl. Pepper gasps. The pile of metal is red, gold, and all too familiar.

"Tony!"

Before she knows what she's doing, she's closed her laptop and more or less let it fall to the floor, already wheeling herself around with her free hand. Several things stand out in the cloud that is her near-panicked mind, the first of which is that the mound of scrap metal has a steady curtain of smoke rising from it. Next, Pepper observes through the glass door to the porch, Tony has taken off his helmet and lies unmoving on the ground with his arms and legs sprawled in any which direction. Third—and she realizes this with a surge of horror—there's no way for her to access him from her wheelchair. Her line of vision drops to the floor and follows a beeline to the nearest door, and finally stops at the site of the obstacle: two meager stair steps separate her from Tony.

He's come home out of shape before, but never completely incapacitated, or unable to speak. Her palms are slick with sweat on the wheels of her chair as she wheels herself, as fast as she can manage, over to the doorway.

"Jarvis!" Pepper calls, fumbling with the intricately-designed lock of the French patio door. The house is silent in response. "Jarvis, I need you to call James!"

Of course the stupid computer system would freeze up in an emergency. Nevertheless she finally shoves the door open with some difficulty and rolls to the edge of the doorway until her wheels bump into the raised doorframe. Pepper calls out her boss's name despite the tightening in her throat and sounds horrified. Tony, in response, makes a spluttering, coughing noise—he probably hasn't even heard her. The pulse thrumming along in her temples is ticking down the seconds, because she may not know what's happened but somehow she knows that she hasn't got very long. She also knows that he's outside and she's still in here, and these two downward steps separating her from the porch outside are the biggest obstacles she has ever faced.

Pepper tries not to think as she rolls backwards away from the door. She's only got one shot, and if she screws up then it's all over, but she's got no other option. Her fingers flex on the wheels of her wheelchair, tingling with dreadful anticipation. And then as fast as she can, Pepper thrusts the wheels forward and rolls to the door, where the wheels catch on the doorframe and send both she and the chair hurtling down the stairs. When she hits the ground, face-first and still in her bathrobe, she takes only a second to recuperate before she tries to lift herself off the ground.

Only when she does, she finds that her weak arms cannot bear her dead weight. A strangled cry escapes from her mouth in her desperation, Pepper trying and trying to lift herself but having no success, until she finally collapses back to the ground, panting and feeling tears beginning to trickle down her face. Three feet away, Tony coughs and stops breathing altogether.

A moment later, Pepper is awake and trying to sit upright in bed, but with little success. Even in the dark she is vaguely aware that her shaking hands are wiping tears from her eyes and smearing them onto her bedsheets. The dream had been so vivid that, for a moment upon awakening, she had thought it to be real.

"Oh, Tony," she breathes into the empty bedroom, burying her face in one hand. "What's happening to me?"

ooo

It's so hot out. Even by California's standards, the weather is ungodly. Tony, decked out in the Iron Man after a brief little argument with his PA, has only been battling with Venom for a few minutes and he's sweating like mad. The air is thick with moisture, the sun beats down on the city without mercy. He's been having a hard time trying to keep Venom under control without causing more chaos in the crowd. They know Iron Man, they know what he's capable of, and those that aren't trying to get away are trying to find a safe place to watch.

Tony loves a crowd, and despite his best attempts to stay focused, he can't help but slow down just a little bit when he spots a middle-aged, Asian man trying to take his photo from ten feet away.

"A little presumptuous, Sir, don't you think?" Jarvis chides in his ear.

Tony smirks beneath the armored mask. "That's business, Jarvis."

Unfortunately, business, as he discovers a moment too late, has given Venom enough time to land on a nearby office building and latch onto an attached lightpost.

Things are moving very fast for Tony now, as his brain begins to put all the pieces of the last few seconds together. Venom is on the office building, tugging on the post and pulling both it and half of the building away. The brick façade is sliding forward from all of Venom's strength, the nearby pedestrians are beginning to scream louder, there's one person slumped, dazed, against the building—

Oh, oh no.

"Pepper!"

Tony kicks his rocket boosters into gear and launches himself across the street just as the first brick comes loose and strikes his PA in the shoulder. He half expects her to just crumble beneath the blow and hit the ground, but instead she lurches sideways before grabbing desperately for the light post. Another brick falls, and then another, and then the face of the building is falling down in a sheet with Pepper ensnared in the middle like a rag doll.

"No!" shouts Tony to the inside of his helmet. "No! Move faster!"

Then finally Pepper crumbles beneath the pressure, tumbling sideways as her grip on the falling pole fails and sends her cascading sideways to the ground. Tony sees Pepper coming closer and closer in his helmet until she's within grabbing distance, but to no avail; just as he reaches out his hand to pull her up and away, she sprawls to the pavement. His armored fingers actually brush her shoulder before the force of his boosters shoots him past her and into the wall. The feeling of hitting solid brick at full speed is a non-issue, irrelevant to the only concern on his mind. Venom has disappeared; Tony doesn't care any more. People all around are running away from these city streets, abandoning their cars and shopping bags to find cover in shops and offices. But not Tony.

Gasping, he pries himself away from the ground and clambers over to Pepper's side, where he drops to his knees. A rush of relief sweeps through him when he sees her blinking up at him.

"Jarvis, get me an ambulance," he commands, already removing his gloves. "And put up her vitals."

"Of course, Sir."

Jarvis blips away in his ear to inform the police. A moment later, Pepper's estimated vital signs appear on the screen before his eyes. The outlook is… shaky, at best. Looking at the actual signs doesn't do him much good, either. He wrenches the face plate away from his helmet and casts it aside before clearing from Pepper any bricks and debris. The pole that Venom had used to dislodge the wall is sitting diagonally across her pelvis, but Tony knows better than to lift it away.

"Pepper, hang on—help's just three minutes away."

Her eyes seem to run over his face, glazed but taking in everything they can. A little trickle of blood has run down from her ear, her blouse is splotched and blossoming red, her hips are twisted at an odd angle. Tony feels his eyes widen in horror at the damage. And then:

"T-tony…"

He may have imagined it—in fact, he's sure he has, but a second later she says it again.

"Tony…"

"Pepper!" Tony whispers in excitement, lowering his face to get a better look at her. Pepper's face is smeared with blood and dirt, her hair is a tangled curtain of red. She doesn't seem to realize that she's spoken, but Tony doesn't care. He leans in to listen. "I'm right here, Pep."

"Tony—" She coughs hoarsely, pauses, lets her head roll to the side, and continues frightenedly, "He's dead."

"Who? Who's dead, Pepper?" he replies quickly, the initial relief of her survival quickly being replaced by dread.

She ignores his question, instead rambling on in a broken voice almost too quiet to be heard. "I tried to—to stop him, but he—wanted to fight." She coughs again, and this time a little eddy of blood runs from the corner of her mouth. Tony wipes it hastily away with his thumb, still leaning closer as her voice becomes more quiet and indistinct. "That's why he's not here… that giant monster k-killed him… the suit didn't work this t-time."

Once he finally realizes just what Pepper is saying, Tony feels his stomach dip even lower. "No, I'm right here, Pepper," he reassures her in low, panic-filled tones. His fingers have begun to shake, but he still lifts a hand and runs it over her forehead (still warm), through her wet hair. Off in the distance, he can hear sirens drawing nearer.

"Tony?"

"Shh…It's okay, Pepper."

"I think I'm go—"

Tony opens his eyes to find himself in bed, his clothes doused in sweat and tears running, unimpeded, in little rivulets down his face. His mind is spinning with the reality of his flashback; he can still see Pepper slipping off into unconsciousness before him, as clear as if he were living it again. Blinking vigorously to clear his vision, he crawls across his bed in a tangle of sheets and turns on the lamp.

"Jarvis, talk to me," he rasps.

"Sir, it would appear that you and Miss Potts are experiencing simultaneous nightmares. Is everything at equilibrium, or should I get assistance?

Tony rubs his face with both hands before grabbing up his pillow and tucking it under his chin. His brows furrow with thought, the light of the lamp casting an eerie shadow over his face. "Simultaneous nightmares?" he repeats darkly.

"Based on my monitoring system's records of your vitals, yes. She is only just awakening, and in the same physical state as you. Should I rouse her, or—?"

"No, no, don't do that," responds Tony, waving away the computer as if it can see his gesture. For the briefest of seconds he'd been toying with the idea that he could go and check on her, but there's a line in their relationship and he isn't about to cross it. She's a big girl, anyway; if she's having a nightmare, she doesn't need him barging in on her. And besides, Tony's not so sure he wants to put himself in a situation where he has to explain his own flashback.

"Let her get back to sleep. She needs rest."

After a moment of brief silence, the AI prompts, "And you don't, Sir?"

"What I need is a drink."

"Oh, that's a surprise."

Tony is already hoisting himself out of bed, then padding across the room to where a small refrigerator is installed in the wall. "Jarvis," he warns the computer as he reaches out for the handle of the fridge, "Remember what I said about criticizing the borderline alcoholic."

"Of course, how could I forget?"

The cool of the refrigerator as it wafts out from the fridge is a most welcome sensation. The blue light bathes numerous bottles of expensive liquor in what he thinks is a very comforting glow. Tony surveys the vast collection before finally reaching in towards the back and pulling out a modestly-sized bottle (at least for him) and popping the cork.

Tony takes one sip, and then another. He briefly wonders if Pepper has fallen back to sleep. The time on the clock says 1:30. He hears a broken voice whisper 'that giant monster k-killed him', shudders, and presses the rim of the bottle to his lips. Another long night.

ooo

ooo


	5. Disruption

A/n: Whew! This is the fastest I've ever updated this story... 11 days, I believe. Impressive.

Anywhoo, this chapter was fairly fast-paced and flowing, and lots of fun! So I do hope you enjoy it. :D

* * *

_V. Disruption_

On one warm Malibu morning a month and a half after she first moved into Tony's home, Pepper is in the midst of preparing to return to her office for the first time. She finds herself a little more than overwhelmed where she sits in her wheelchair, trying to wrestle her unresponsive feet into a pair of 4-inch heels.

She used to be able to do this one-handedly, thinks Pepper with some remorse as she's forced to transfer a freshly-buttered piece of toast to her teeth so that she can use both hands on the shoe. There was once a time where she could walk, eat, strap on a pair of heels and deal with Tony on the phone, all at the same time. The lack of a real need to rush around has taken off her edge a bit, it seems.

Tony still seems impressed at her dexterity, at any rate, going as far as commenting that he'd like to see her flexibility later in the evening, if she would be so willing to demonstrate. She finishes the clasp on her shoe, removes the piece of toast from its holding spot after taking a nice big bite, and takes her time to chew it. Being away from society has its benefits, too; as of late she's become accustomed to taking her time in activities that she used to do as quickly as possible—eating, for example. She can't seem to remember what enjoying a piece of toast was like before this very moment.

She finishes off the bite and replies with a smirk, "No can do, Mr. Stark."

Tony slides a steaming Stark Industries mug down in front of her. "A little out of practice, Potts?"

"You could say that," she replies with nonchalance, taking a sip of coffee and shooting him a look over the brim. "You should have seen me before the accident—I could stick my feet behind my head and everything."

Tony makes what very well could be a lamenting noise as he crosses the kitchen to pour himself a cup of coffee. Pepper silently enjoys the rest of her toast to the sound of his regretful silence before brushing any stray crumbs from her lap and straightening the jacket of her suit in that no-nonsense manner she can still achieve, even after being away from the workplace environment for so long.

"Well, no use in living in the past, I suppose."

On that, she sits back in her chair with the mug of coffee. He hasn't jibed her like that in quite some time. The strange thing is that she finds that she'd actually missed their playful, only half-joking banter. He's probably only stopped hitting on her because she's injured, or because he doesn't want her to feel uncomfortable in his house. Which, while very sweet, she supposes, is still very un-Tony-like. His quips are a sure sign that things are getting back to normal. Tony seems to be thinking along the same lines, for when she looks up from her lap and meets his eyes, she gets a strange chill from his pensive expression.

He's half-sitting on the countertop with a cup of coffee balanced on one knee of his oil-smeared jeans, the arc reactor glowing blue beneath a black beater. She can tell by the smudge of grease below his left ear that he's been under his car all morning (or what remains of the car, since last she'd heard he'd actually set one on fire, thanks to the suit and a malfunctioning blowtorch). But despite his very simplistic appearance, when his warm eyes catch and hang on to hers, Pepper knows that his thoughts are anything but uncomplicated. There's something very Old Days Tony about his searching stare, something very frighteningly familiar about the way that one lock of hair falls just the right way on his brow, the subtle smirk just barely visible in the corner of his mouth. And in the next moment she opens her mouth to speak, finds no words, and sets her coffee mug down on the table so that she can break contact.

"Ah… so—" She raises her eyes hesitantly. Tony's moved on to drinking his coffee with a little more interest than usual. She snatches her trusty leatherbound planner from the table and opens it. "I'll see you at the office, then. Uhm, you have to meet with some guys from the engineering wing around noon. I guess they've been complaining about having to work on the Freedom project you assigned. I'm not really clear on the details but I'm sure you can handle it."

"Is that it?"

Is that it. Pepper almost laughs until she realizes just how scary that sounds coming from Tony. She hasn't had to bribe or boot him out of the house for a meeting since before the accident. The distinct feeling of uselessness associated with this new response is a downer.

"Well, if you're really on top of things then you'll get to your eye appointment at five. After you said you couldn't read that sign on your last mission, I thought it might be a good idea to get it checked out."

Tony raises his eyebrows at her in surprise. "You think I need glasses, Potts?"

"Usually not being able to read a road sign is a pretty good indicator," she nods with a small smile at his expense. "Besides, you never know if—"

At that moment, the sound of Happy's car horn blares from outside in a most welcome tension-breaker, causing Pepper to jump in her chair. She bids Tony goodbye, grabs her purse from the table near the door, and wheels out the door.

ooo

Happy drops her off in the lobby and heads off to snag a last-minute breakfast at the doughnut shop down the street, but Pepper doesn't mind being left to fend for herself. Besides, her long trip across the building is punctuated with friendly greetings and warm welcomes from fellow co-workers who don't seem at all disheartened by the fact that she's wheeling herself around with her purse on her lap and a laptop case strapped to the back off the chair. Trish from HR even goes as far as saying that Pepper "at least has really nice biceps now", to which Pepper can only smile and nod in reply whilst taking a mental note to examine her arms later. But after what feels like a thousand rounds of "Hey, how're you doing?" and "Yeah—no, I really can't feel my legs at all… yeah, it's really something, alright", Pepper finally rolls through the door labeled "Virginia Potts—Administrative Asst. to CEO Tony Stark".

She's holding her breath as the door closes behind her. As it turns out, she needn't even brace herself. Not much has changed. Just the feeling of it.

In fact, the spotless office looks exactly as it did when she left it all those weeks ago. Someone has clearly been in to tidy things up and keep the dust from settling on the remnants of what could very well be her "old" life, but the same junk novel is still sitting on her desk with the bookmark in the same spot—maybe she'll read it again someday, if she has time—and when she turns on her computer, the desktop is still a picture of a sunrise from one of her trips to Tony's Dubai place.

The wheels of Pepper's chair thud lightly against the mahogany desk as she leans in for a closer look at the desktop. She's always been meticulous about the icons, so they're lined up neatly and in alphabetical order. From her desk she examines every little detail of the area that she can reach, from the sticky note on the underside of her desk that says "I see you" in Tony's untidy scrawl (I wonder how long that's been there, she thinks dryly) to the now very dehydrated, uncapped highlighter on top of a stack of memos. Sighing, Pepper heaves her bag onto her lap from the back of the chair and pulls her laptop from within. Tony had offered to bring her laptop in to the office and back it up on the main computer system, but she had declined with the excuse that she couldn't bear to part with her computer, even if he were the one taking it. In reality, she's been nursing the desire to come back to her old factory room, the place where she for so long cranked out all of Tony's business, and see if she feels anything for it like she used to.

Something's changed. Now that she's been away for so long, she has a hard time calling it home. And what's more, the feeling is familiar and unwelcome, because she has so been looking forward to coming back. Quickly, as to shove aside that unnamed sensation in the pit of her stomach, she sets her laptop on the desk and begins work.

ooo

"Tony?"

Getting the front door open without rolling backwards down the wheelchair ramp is always a hassle and a half. Pepper, with two white paper bags filled with Chinese food balanced precariously on her knees, maneuvers through the front door. No response from Tony. He's probably in the garage anyway, slaving away on his supposed remedy for her and her issues, or the Iron Man—

"In the living room, Pep!" comes the unexpected response.

Okay, so he's not in the garage after all. Unusual, but then again Tony hasn't really been his usual creature-of-habit self lately, and so she masks her look of surprise and starts for the aforementioned room.

"I brought Chinese for dinner," she announces loudly to him. "From that restaurant down the—oh."

Pepper stops rolling so fast that she almost loses the food all across the practically sparkling floor, and with good reason.

Sitting on the couch is Tony, a glass of something that Pepper simply assumes is strong in one hand and his other arm draped around the back of the seat. Beside him is what appears to be a man in his late twenties, also with drink. Pepper can't really think of anything to say. He gives her a friendly wave from where he sits, dressed in jeans, a black T-shirt, and… a mask. A red and blue spandex mask with large, glittering eyes.

She almost asks what Spider-Man is doing here, but luckily she's so surprised to see him sitting there that she can do no more than shoot Tony a questioning look that he responds to with a contented smile.

"Pepper, meet my good friend Peter."

Pepper raises a hand in greeting and puts on the smile she usually reserves for re-meeting Tony's "do you remember me?" friends, not out of callousness but perplexion. For the moment, all thoughts of work have vanished in a wisp of curiosity.

"It's nice to finally meet you, Peter. I've heard a lot about you."

"Nice to meet you, too." There is a fleeting, awkward pause. "Incidentally, I'm really sorry about the whole, well, this—" he makes a gesture towards her wheelchair. "But if it's any compensation, I got my butt kicked a day later by the same guy, so it's like poetic justice."

"He also brought his own lunch, so we're set on food for now, I think," Tony adds, still with the air of calm.

Pepper looks at the pair of them sitting casually on the couch for a few more moments before she slowly wheels backwards about a foot or so, feeling distinctly as if she's walked into an important conversation of which she was probably the uninvited subject. Gingerly she picks up one of the paper bags and starts heading towards the more secluded kitchen.

"I'll go set this up."

Once the sound of her wheels across the floor has faded into silence, Tony takes a sip of his bourbon and turns back to the masked Peter, who is looking right back at him.

"What a catch," he says, almost breathlessly. "Now I feel really _really_ bad about this whole thing."

"Ah, don't. It's all in the past now. I'm a futurist, Pete; the way I see it, the sooner I can get this remedy working, the sooner we can move on to bigger and better things. The only problem… is that it's not working. It's doing about as much as a massive dose of saline."

"Well sure, but if you flew me all the way down here from New York, then there must be something stupendously wrong with it, am I right?"

"Could be. I gave Pepper what I thought could be the final product a while ago, but no luck. Although I think it might have caused some psychological side-effects."

"Do I even want to know?"

Tony scratches his goatee thoughtfully, his eyes moving towards the ceiling in thought. "Just nightmares. She didn't really want to talk about it when I asked, but Jarvis seems to think that they're about me—just things she's been muttering, you know? It's all very disturbing. I'm not sure whether it's just because she's worried about me going out in the suit all the time."

Peter makes a thoughtful 'hmm'-ing sound. "I dunno, Tony. MJ has weird nightmares about me all the time. Actually, sometimes we have them at the same time, about each other. I can't explain it with science. It's just one of those weird things that happen to couples, I guess." Upon Tony's meaningful silence, which Peter thankfully does not recognize as being such, he cracks his knuckles and asks eagerly, "So, what is it, do you think? A big issue?"

"If it were stupendous, I would have found it already. It's small, some tiny error, and I've come close to getting the solution right a few times. If it were mathematical I'm pretty sure I would have found it, so I dragged you all the way down here to look at the composition and check for alternate serum makeup."

"Do you really think I know all that stuff, Tony?"

"Absolutely. You're a chemistry teacher, aren't you? You made those web-shooting things with that formula you and your dad created, didn't you?"

Peter hesitates. "… You know, I had this really horrible biology teacher in the tenth grade. Just because you specialize in something doesn't mean you're actually competent."

At this comment, Tony sets his glass on the table with a soft thud and turns squarely to where Peter is sitting with his hands clasped, looking distinctly silly in his civilian clothes and Spider-Man mask combo.

"Just level with me, Pete." He speaks slowly, almost as if instructing a child (or, better yet, trying to talk sense into the Board members). In turn, Peter's body posture is the perfect, round-shouldered match for Tony's would-be lecture. "True or false: you secretly really want to have the chance to look at this potentially world-changing medication, but you don't want to take the chance of screwing it up and killing my assistant."

A moment later comes the pointed response: "This is a trick question."

"See? You're perfectly competent. If you weren't at least a little scared, you'd be an idiot. Now answer the question."

"True, then." He doesn't sound thrilled, but the level of interest in his tone has risen significantly since Tony first brought up the proposition.

"That's no excuse. Hold on, I know exactly what you need." Tony heaves himself off of the couch and strides across the room to where he keeps a liquor cabinet, from which he draws forth a capped bottle and a shotglass. He can feel Peter's masked eyes on his casually-clad back as he pops the cap and pours a glass with the air of a well-practiced bartender, then closes it and shuts it once more in the cabinet.

He turns on one heel and quirks a brow. "I'm going to assume you're staring at me in a combination of horror and amazement."

"You could say that," Peter replies, taking the filled glass when it is offered to him and staring into it. "So this is the secret to your success?"

"Success, failure—they're all a means to an end. If we really screw it up, then I'll look back at it later and the answer will be staring me in the face."

"If you say so." Peter pulls the mask up just high enough to down the shot and shake his head vigorously with accompanying sound effects. He leaps to his feet, pulling the mask back down over his face. "Let's check out that dose."

An hour later, Peter announces to an expectantly-waiting Pepper, whose dinner is now very cold and quite forgotten in the face of possible news, that as far as he can tell, the makeup of the concoction is both pragmatic and—he punctuates the statement with a hiccup—expertly mixed, if he does say so himself.

"Is that a one drink hiccup?" asks Pepper, who has to remind herself that not everyone has the tolerance of Tony.

Peter apologizes hastily. "I don't drink. Usually."

Pepper, in turn, shoots her boss a sardonic look. "I see we've moved from corrupting your company to corrupting the superhero society," she teases, scooting backwards to allow them entry to the top of the staircase from Tony's shop.

He knocks the back of her wheelchair affectionately with his elbow as he brushes past with Peter in tow. "I de-corrupted Stark Industries," he reminds her over his shoulder with a smirk. "Besides, I think I've corrupted you sufficiently since we've been working together, so I know my limits."

"Sure you do. Put the food in the microwave, please."

He's probably thinking of all the times he's made her lie about re-scheduling when he takes a day of irresponsibility (also known as almost every day), but she knows better. Tony may blow off meetings and special appearances, but he's a work-a-holic by nature with the interests of his company at heart, and he gets his work done—regardless of how many body shot's he'd taken the night before off of the blonde from communications. Oh no, Pepper reflects as she urges her wheelchair after them towards the informal kitchen, where she's sure Tony is already helping himself to one of her egg rolls, if anything it's his women who've corrupted her. At least he could programmed Jarvis to warn her upon entering the house of any potential dangers lurking in his bedroom, the bathroom, the stairwell leading to the upstairs balcony, her office… Pepper's greatest corruption lies somewhere in no longer feeling sympathy for the blubbering babes Tony leaves (used to leave? She thinks) behind in the morning. Sometimes she even torments them, the poor dears; several times she has managed to make them whine by just mentioning that it is she who will of course relay the message to Mr. Stark that they'll be calling him later, not them…

"Do we have any sweet and sour sauce, Potts?"

"Unless you put it on your cereal this morning, it should be in the fridge." She hears the door open, and then there is silence. "On the left, under the milk."

"Ah, right."

_You're welcome._ Old habits die hard. Making sarcastic comments in her head is one of them, regardless that she doesn't even mean most of them anymore.

Pepper enters the kitchen without comment at the way Peter's pulled his mask up just below his eyes so he can enjoy the sandwich he's apparently brought himself in a brown paper bag. If the sleeves of his shirt didn't betray his obvious adult muscle, she might accuse him of being an overly-excited kid who just isn't ready to give up Halloween. Considering that it's July, that's pretty sad.

Once Tony finally emerges with the sweet and sour sauce, they settle down for a meal. He asks her how her first day back at the office went, and she responds that it was good, poking at her lukewarm chicken with a pair of chopsticks. And it had been, had it not? All had gone according to schedule. There is just that feeling she had encountered upon situating herself at her desk. At first she isn't sure what it means, or why it's so familiar, but now she realizes that that it's simply that sense of initial fear. She'd felt it the very first time she walked into that office in all its vast glory, and today she'd experienced it again.

"You sound thrilled," Tony observes through a mouthful of egg roll.

She shrugs in response, glad to at least have identified that nagging sensation in the pit of her stomach. The revelation improves her appetite at least enough for her to actually begin eating. Tony's skeptical look gaze lingers on her downcast face for only a little longer before he finally tears it away to face Peter.

"So it's not a chemical issue. It must be the math then, which is really annoying because I must have checked it a thousand times."

Peter shrugs. "You already know what I think. As far as I can tell, everything looks good. No toxic combinations, which is a really nice benefit—" Pepper shoots him a brow-raised look at this particular comment, "—and a really good balance of proteins. It's gotta be the math. I think you've gotta call in the big dogs to check it over this time."

"Hmm…"

Pepper doesn't know what the "big dogs" are, but Tony doesn't seem all too put off by the idea of having them come over for a look. Quite the contrary, he returns to eating his fourth egg roll with new vigor. She doesn't ask; he's got that contemplative look in his eyes that means he's all business right now and won't hear a word she says, and sure enough a second later he's talking biochemistry with a very enthusiastic Peter. Pepper finishes her meal while listening to their conversation with polite but genuine interest, though she doesn't know at all what they're talking about, since Tony's usually blabbering on to her about physics, not chemistry. After dinner, Peter shakes both she and Tony's hands, offers her another heartfelt apology for this whole mess, and leaves again.

Once the door closes, Pepper follows Tony off towards the living room.

"He's a nice kid," she says. "He doesn't seem too upset at being dragged here all the way from New York, though. You'd think that it'd be a hassle."

Despite him walking up ahead of her, she can practically hear the smile in his voice as he replies, "That's because I put him him, his wife, and his aunt at a resort in Laguna for the rest of the week. Top-knotch."

"I wouldn't expect anything from less from the generous Tony Stark," she jibes. "But in all seriousness, he does seem to know what he's talking about. I'm surprised he couldn't get down to the heart of the matter."

"Unfortunately, we're not even sure what the heart of the matter is any more. It's not a question of smarts, because Pete's one of the smartest guys around—albeit a little naïve, but it's nice to have his sense of humor in the house. I like to think it brings out the best in me." He puffs his chest out as he turns on his heel to face her.

She crosses her arms in a mock skepticism. "I thought that was my job, Mr. Stark."

"Oh, but it is, Ms. Potts. Just in a different way."

"And what way is that?"

He offers her a wicked grin, but before he has the chance to explain, the phone at his belt goes off to a midi version some metal song she doesn't recognize. The smile drops the instant he's pulled the phone from his waist and taken a look at the screen.

"Shit."

"Who is it?" asks Pepper over the sound of the ringtone, genuinely concerned.

"Trevor again. He's still badgering me about those damn engineers—"

"I take it that means the meeting didn't go quite as smoothly as planned."

The look he gives her as he answers the phone ("What," he says tersely) is enough to confirm her suspicion. Those engineers have been complaining about the complexity of their new project for several days now, having come across the problem of not having tools small enough to work with the parts of the latest Stark Chip, better known as the Freedom Project. Pepper observes their argument just long enough to get the minor details from the one side of the conversation she can hear before she wheels off to her office. Judging by the way Tony has begun to pace the length of the room like he tends to when trying to sort out a complicated physics problem in his head, they won't be done for a while, and when he is done he's likely not going to want to do anything but work on making the issue more graspable to what he has taken to calling "the shop nimrods". That being said, Pepper had picked up some extra paperwork from Tony's desk on her way out of the office, and in the meantime she busies herself with that, reclined on the most cushiony chair in her office with her feet propped up and her lapdesk on her knees.

At some point, the business conversation ends and Tony's deep tones stop humming through the closed door. Pepper pays this no heed, as she's already immersed wholly and completely in a statement from the Malcom Metal Company. Beforehand, she'd taken out her contact lenses in exchange for her glasses, and thus every once in a while she has to reach up and stop the rims from slipping down her nose. There's a distinct sound of Tony moving things around in his office across the hall, unheard by Pepper in her state.

They want to make a "subtle" change to the contract, she reads silently. No thank you. Pepper takes a yellow highlighter to the document without mercy, bringing to the forefront anything that she thinks Tony should see before talking to Mr. Malcolm. The thirty pages of text are long and boring, but before long she's forgotten all about Tony and his incompetent engineers as she delves deeper into the negotiations pages. Any chance of those lawyers slipping in an extraneous claim is smothered soundly by Pepper and her well-practiced highlighter. They never even stood a chance, she notes with a smirk on her own behalf—

"Hey Potts, you got a second?"

Pepper looks up from the document, the glasses slipping down just a smidge. She pushes them back up the bridge of her nose with a forefinger, absently. Tony has soundlessly opened and door and stands there, arms crossed.

"Sure. How'd the call go?"

"Irrelevant. Right now I need to know how to file these invoices."

A fleeting pause passes between them, almost tense only because Pepper is certain that she didn't just hear him ask about sorting invoices. As far as she knows, he's never so much as touched something so trivial as an invoice, never mind actually taken the time to sort one. Finally, she regains her senses and deadpans, "…What?"

"Invoices, Potts. I made a bunch of copies and have screwed them up royally in the process of trying to sort them." He gives her a moment to speak. "How should I sort them?"

"Um." She glances down at the Malcom contract with just a hint of remorse. The rest will have to wait for now. "I would sort by company, project, item number, then date, respectively."

"Care to show me?"

"Of course. Give me just one second…"

Pepper sets aside the contract and her highlighter, moves the lapdesk to the floor, and has just begun to hoist herself from the recliner when Tony's at her side in a flash. Wordlessly he scoops her up (she emits a tiny squeak of surprise, glad that today she's wearing pants instead of a skirt, even though the latter is much easier to get into with her uncooperative legs) and carries her across the hallway to his own in-home office.

His room is much larger than hers, but only because it houses a full-sized conference table for less formal weekend meetings. A few years ago he knocked down one of the far walls and installed a retractable false wall, which has been lowered into the ground for the time being to reveal a smaller, more cozier-looking living room than the modern one Pepper tends to haunt. There's a pair of squashy loveseats, a recliner, and a table in the middle of it all. The flatscreen, mounted on the far wall, is on to CNN but muted (the market is up today, she notices with a smile as Tony sets her down on one of the loveseats). At the moment, she can see that Tony has dragged a few large file cabinets over to the coffee table, what's surface is nearly invisible under a mountain of papers.

"Looks like you've been busy today," she observes evenly, though one of her eyebrows rises towards her boss.

"It's not from today. While you were… unable to work… I actually had to start doing things on my own, since hiring a temp was only going to make my job a lot harder. This," he gestures to the table, sitting down beside her on the seat, "is the product of my efforts. I've never seen so much gibberish in my life. I figured that you're back, so I can actually get around to clearing some of this up."

"This 'gibberish' is your business in a nutshell, Mr. Stark. In which, luckily for you, I happen to be fluent. Now what about these invoices?"

Tony nods, picking up a stack on the far side of the table and setting it in her outstretched hand. "These are from June, during the final stages of the deal with Malcolm Metals. I'm just not sure exactly where it falls into line compared with this second set here." He hands her a second, similar stack of papers.

Pepper straightens her glasses and takes a look at both sheets before ultimately handing him the first. "The item on this one is more complex than on the first sheet, so it goes first. The second one's a little tricky because they have the same date, but then you just read by the sort of material being shipped. I can't believe you don't know how to do this, Tony. It's all really basic office management." Her voice isn't as much accusatory as it is surprised. "But then again, you probably skipped those courses in high school."

"Considering how I skipped high school, that would be a very accurate assumption to make."

They chat causally as Pepper helps him sort through his mess of paperwork. They've become accustomed to talking in this manner instead of solely business. Conversation ranges from work to the media to Pepper's forthcoming doctor's appointment and all the meetings she'll have to reschedule if he insists on joining her, and is punctuated regularly by instruction on Pepper's part regarding the paperwork. Though she doesn't let herself acknowledge it, she thoroughly enjoys the way his voice dips into a deep thrum when he's trying to think something out. They're side-by-side on the small loveseat, and while she can't feel his leg brushing against hers every time he shifts his weight to grab another stack of papers, Pepper is more than able to hear the subtle vibration in his voice whenever he talks about the task at hand. Eventually they do finish, after a solid hour of mucking about in what seems like an endless sea of memos and invoices, and Tony shuts the last file cabinet with a resounding and very welcome snap.

"Well, Ms. Potts," he sighs, leaning back and stretching his arms across the back of the couch, "That was torturous. I don't know how I made it those three weeks you were out."

"Neither do I," she chuckles into her hand. "Not to say you're not perfectly capable of taking care of yourself, Mr. Stark," she adds with a nod of approval. "As we've just seen here, you can be taught after all."

"Sure I can. Got any more tricks you'd care to share with your old boss?"

"I can teach you your social security number, for starters. Hand me that notepad and I'll show you."

Tony complies with her request. "Hmm, I've always wondered what that was."

This is his way of not-so-subtly telling her that he's genuinely interested in what she's talking about, which is a long cry from where they'd started all those years ago. Tony interested in self-management—the boring stuff instead of just getting his hands dirty in mechanics, big business, and voluptuous women—is an eerily new side of Tony, almost unwelcome to the territorial PA but endearing enough so that she can't help to comply (that, and he is her boss, and if he wants to learn to sort invoices she can't stop him). Pepper jots the nine digits at the top of the page, then offers the pad and pencil to him. Upon looking at her neat, curving lines, he grins.

"See? I knew it started with a five."

Pepper smiles. "Yes, well that only leaves you eight more to go. And I've found that the easiest way to do it is by writing it down over and over until you've learned it completely. Something about the repetition just makes it stick."

"When in Rome… how many times, do you think?"

"Ten usually does the trick, sometimes more if it's a long list or something complicated. If you really want to get your point across and you've got nothing to lose, then a hundred. Nice and slow."

"I think ten will work out just fine."

Tony takes a minute to slowly print his social security number ten times, one below the other, in handwriting far neater than she has ever seen on any note he has ever left her. When he's finished, he passes the notepad back to his assistant with a confident "There! Ten times, just like that" and closes his eyes to recite the numbers. When he does so perfectly, as she'd known that he would, Tony opens his eyes and greets her with that look that she knows too well.

"How about that, Potts? I'm not completely helpless in the ways of taking care of my own affairs."

"Very good, Mr. Stark. Soon you'll be so self-sufficient you won't even need me any more."

What is perhaps the most awkward silence in the history of boss-employee relations sidles down between them in less than an instant, thick and suffocating. The second she sees the smile droop slightly, the moment she notices the crease forming in between his eyebrows, Pepper wishes she'd not spoken at all. Any sort of attempt at recovery has vanished from the forefront of her mind, leaving her defenseless. Luckily, Tony, it seems, can't think of anything to say either. So, being ever the professional at avoiding situations in which he appears anything less than confident, Tony changes the topic.

"Speaking of lists," he notes, patting the paper that sits on his knee, "have you started your recovery list yet?"

She honestly has no idea what he's talking about. "I'm not sure what you mean."

"You know, your recovery list!" He's rising from the couch and making his way towards his desk, where a Swiss Miss hot chocolate maker sits with the 'on' light flashing. "The list of things you plan on doing as soon as you get the function of your legs back. I made one when I broke my arm during little league football—do you want a hot chocolate?"

"Sure, thank you." Pepper, glad for a change from her stumble, eyes his back while he goes about fixing two mugs of hot chocolate. Funny, she never much thought of him as the football type, even as a kid. She'd always had this image of a scrawny, seven-year-old Tony tinkering underneath cars while all his other friends—would he have even have had friends as a kid?—went out and played kickball. "And no, I haven't. I suppose I haven't really put that much thought into it."

This is a lie. Or, at the very least, a far cry from the whole truth. Pepper figures that it's natural for any injured person to fantasize about being healthy and whole, and she's no exception. As for a written list? Well, she's been busy.

"Well that's just not acceptable," comes the casual response from her boss. "I think you ought to write one."

"You mean right now?"

"Absolutely."

Once he's finished with the hot chocolate maker, he sets two frothy mugs on the coffee table in exchange for the pen and paper. She watches him as he rolls the pen between his fingers as he thinks, and then as he writes 'Pepper's Recovery List' across the top of the page, beneath the Stark Industries logo that comes standard on this particular brand of memo paper. Then he scrawls a number 1 and turns to face her. "Any thoughts?"

More as a distraction than out of actual thirst, Pepper takes up the mug and presses her lips to the warm porcelain. She indulges a sip, savoring the perfect blend of chocolate and cream before replying, "I promised myself that if I ever get better, I'm going to run a marathon."

It sounds silly, coming from her when she can't even feel her legs, but Tony doesn't laugh. Instead he scrawls 'run a marathon' in the spot for number one without so much as a smirk. Only when he shoots her a sidelong glance and sees her obvious insecurity does he smile.

"I think that's admirable, Pepper," he reassures her. "Maybe a little ambitious for starters, but not impossible. What else?"

"I'd like to go swimming," she says, this time without hesitation. "In the Caribbean."

"Now that's more like it. And hardly implausible."

Pepper can sense Tony's genuine interest—probably more interest in her than in the topic itself, but she admires his attention span all the same. She'd never been sure what to expect about living with Tony, but it certainly hasn't turned out the way she'd suspected. Something's changed about him since those days before Afghanistan, and now that she's spent almost all her time with him… well, it scares her a little to admit that she's enjoying herself right now. Her fingers tighten around her mug, seeking a pinch of reality in the mug's scaldingly hot surface. Here she finds no reassurance that it's just a fluke. She shouldn't be this content, not with her condition as it is and the company still trying to recover from its previous meltdown (almost a year ago from the Iron Man catastrophe, how time flies!). It's probably the half dozen medications.

When Pepper raises her eyes and lets them wander over her boss's profile as he writes her second thought; his jawline, that dreadfully appealing lock of hair that she can't help but admire—

Yes. Definitely the meds.

"What next, Potts?" He asks, turning his head towards her, expectantly.

Pepper isn't even sure, but before she even has time to ask, a soft beep overhead signals that Jarvis has entered the conversation. The AI is as matter-of-fact as always as he informs his master that, "Sir, it appears that someone is trying rather admirably to enter the house."

Tony stands up so fast that Pepper, who doesn't have the same stability without legpower, nearly falls sideways into his now vacant spot on the loveseat. "Who is it?"

"I cannot say for certain. Two women, one of which is now trying to break down the door."

Pepper almost scoffs. Judging by the look on Tony's face, he seems genuinely surprised to see any visitors, female or otherwise. She supposes this is a good reflection of his newly-refined character.

"Shall I fetch you video surveillance?"

"Yeah, do that."

A moment later, the TV switches from CNN to a live video stream of the two women at the front door. The image is crystal clear, and in good lighting despite the darkness outside. And it only takes a second for Pepper to realize just who the visitors are. One of them is peering through the window with her hands cupped around her eyes to block out the light, while the other is busy pounding on the door. Pepper's almost surprised that she can't hear them from where she sits on the other side of the mansion. Alarmed, she cranes her neck upward towards Tony and demands that he bring her to her wheelchair. They share a brief stare, expressions hard and all talk of lists and hot chocolate forgotten. Tony complies with her request, lifting her from the couch and carrying her to her office, and together they make their ways towards the door.

Tony gets there first. He doesn't open the door, but instead jabs the button on a two-way talking system by the door.

He says it so politely that Pepper would smile at the contrast between his face and his voice if she weren't so annoyed: "Can I help you?"

The fumbling and static that come from the other side of the sound system tell the pair of them that the women are trying to respond. There's more fumbling, a muttered "Shit, Jessie. How the hell do you work this thing?" before the elder of the two women finally answers.

"Yes, you can. I demand to see my daughter now!"

Pepper's older sister appears in the small window. "Mom—Mom, I see her! She's in there!"

Despite her mother not pressing the button, Pepper can hear her sister just fine through the glass. Jessie's breath mists up the glass, her nose leaving a little dot in the condensation as she presses her forehead and nose against it to get a better look. She jabs a finger against the window, turns, mutters something that sounds suspiciously like "He's still got her locked up in there", and jabs the glass again.

"Let us in!" demands Pepper's mother over the speaker again.

Tony pauses, clearly looking for some sort of witty comeback (Pepper knows that face too well to mistake it for anything else), then settles on a simple, "Uh, no thanks."

"Now you listen here, Tony Stark!" Pepper's mom shouts at the box. Pepper can imagine that she's just about pounding on the 'talk' button. "I've told you this once and I'm going to tell you again—I want you to have nothing to do with my daughter, do you hear me? Nothing. And if I have to break down this door, I—WILL—have—her. Now."

Tony raises his hand to press the button, but Pepper stops him with a faint "Tony, don't" from where she sits just behind him and slightly off to the side. At his silence, Jessie presses her face against the window again and squints into the dimly-lit foyer. Pepper's mother, Theresa, goes off again, sounding distinctly crazed.

"Open this door, you sonofabitch!" She doesn't bother with the talk button this time, electing to pound on the door some more instead. Both Pepper and Jessie jump in surprise. Tony is unfazed. "I will not let Virginia stay in your house any longer, you murderer! You almost killed her and now you expect to keep her all locked up here—" Her voice is rising exponentially to a near-screech. The look on Tony's face is indignant, with a hint of that guilt that Pepper does not like to see under any circumstances.

Pepper can't take it any more. Her hands nearly shaking in anger (and a mingled fear, though she won't admit it), she wheels forward towards the door. She reaches up and moves Tony away from the speaker system by forcefully pushing the outside of his thigh from the door; it doesn't do much strength wise, but he steps out of the way in his surprise at her sudden urge to speak. Pepper has used this speaker countless times, but she has to crane her neck forward and almost shout to reach it from the reduced height of her wheelchair.

"Mother, listen to me," she says calmly, eyes on the black speaker. She glances towards the window again, where her sister is still watching. "You too, Jessie. Tony has nothing to do with this, and you have no right to come barging in here and demand anything."

"Virginia, don't you talk to me like that—"

"No, don't you talk to me like that. I'm a perfectly capable adult."

"—Virginia, he nearly killed you—"

Tony shifts off to her right. Pepper holds back a sardonic laugh, the fingers of her free hand clenching the arm rest of her wheelchair in a white-knuckled grip. "You think he almost killed me, ma? What about when we needed to see the medical records and you withheld them just because of your pride? What about that, mom?"

This time, Tony rests a hand on her shoulder and tries to gently interject, but she shrugs him away without paying any heed. The blood is thumping away in her temples, full of pent-up frustration and guilt and unidentifiable emotion over this whole ordeal. If she's going to speak her mind, being incapacitated and having a solid wall between the two parties is only to her benefit. At the very least, it keeps her from attacking to her red-headed potential. Pepper swallows the lump in her throat before speaking once more.

"Just—leave Malibu, please." Despite the strength of her voice, she's sure that Tony can hear the hint of desperation she only used to use when Tony made her job really difficult. "Go back to Pennsylvania."

"I'm not going home without you, Virginia," says her mother adamantly.

Pepper hesitates, shoots another glance at the window (her sister's face is now pressed against the window, her too-wide-eyed state fixated on Tony where he stands with his fists skeptically on his waist), and turns back to the speaker.

"I am home."

The reaction is instantaneous. Theresa gives a very audible shout from outside and begins to pound on the door again, screaming profanities. Pepper wheels backwards in resignation so that she and Tony are side-by-side about two feet from the window.

"They're crazy," she says under her breath. "I haven't seen them for years before the accident, and now they turn up, expecting me to just go with them when I clearly don't belong there."

Tony agrees, in fewer words. The pounding and screaming stops. Jessie turns her head, presumably to watch whatever Theresa is doing, before she is pulled forcibly away from the glass ("Move your ass, Jessica!"). Before Tony and Pepper can react, Theresa appears in the window for a split second before she backs up and a loud crash sounds throughout the mansion. The next thing Pepper knows is that a shower of glass is cascading over her and all she can do is cover her head—

Tony swears loudly, just barely dodging the rock that Pepper's mother has apparently hurdled through the window. Pepper, her face buried in the crook of her arm to protect her face from any flying debris, feels the shards of glass land and bounce harmlessly off her back before she's lifted bodily from her wheelchair. Her eyes are clamped shut, mostly from the shock at the realization that her mother has very likely just snapped completely but also because she had not been expecting her mother to actually attack the house. Tony strides quickly away from the door, carrying Pepper from harm's way whilst telling Jarvis to put the house in lockdown mode. Pepper's only ever seen Jarvis put the house into lockdown once (an incident with a particularly unhappy, recently-fired employee who had been determined to kill Tony with a Swiss Army knife), but she doesn't look up to see the bars drop down from all the windows. She doesn't care. In the literal seven seconds after the enormous crash, all she can feel is Tony's arm around her back as he lifts her away and sinks down so that the pair of them is squashed between the wall and the front of the couch. His arc reactor is pressing into her side and the sounds of shouting from both of the other women are muffled by the time she raises her head from her arm and peers around. Jarvis has killed the lights, leaving her and Tony alone with his built-in night light.

"Good God," she breathes, not because of what just happened but because there are actually frightened tears in her eyes. Pepper blinks them away in frustration.

Tony gives an appreciative chuckle. "You all right, Potts?"

The rumble of his hushed voice through his chest is more comforting that she'll openly confess. She heaves a sigh.

"Just startled…"

Tony shifts her so that she's not so much sitting on his legs as she is sitting beside him. He looks rather out of place cramped behind the couch, his legs bent up towards her chest with her own legs bent perpendicularly over his. It's not exactly like Tony Stark to be hiding in any way, but the grip he has supporting her waist is definitely very characteristic.

And despite the sound of Pepper's mother still pounding helplessly on the door, and despite the fact that she probably has shards of glass in her hair, and that she's never been in such close proximity to her boss before, when she raises her chin to meet his eyes, they can only stare at one another in seriousness for a split second before they burst into a quiet fit of laughter. The situation is anything but funny, but the moment she meets his eyes and sees the ironic look on his face, she can't contain the bubble of laughter that inevitably bursts in her chest. And nor can Tony.

They don't speak, nor do they acknowledge their propinquity. They simply sit there in the dark, huddled close together on Tony's living room floor, and laugh at the ways of the world. Pepper lets her head fall into the crook of his shoulder, turns her face inward—she can smell the clean cotton on his shirt and that scent that she knows to be solely his—and laughs. In times like these, there is nothing else they can do but laugh.

And oh, does it feel good.

ooo

ooo


	6. Revelation

A/n: Oh, hi there! You may not know me. My name is Invaderk, and I haven't updated this story in almost a year. Well, a few things happened, but nothing really worth noting besides that I stopped writing for a few months and this is the first thing I went back to when I picked up a pencil again. That being said, it's REALLY difficult to crank out something respectable when you take that long of a break! Holy crap guys, the first draft was GOD AWFUL. So I fixed it a little, then passed it to the pros. Here I must thank the prompt and wonderful cardxiv, who read the entire story all at once, then went over the insane amount of pages of this chapter and got back to me within twenty four hours. So thank you, oh so much! :D

Hopefully the 70-something people who have this on their alert list will find this story and re-connect with it the way I have.

Disclaimer: I own nothing.

Happy Reading!

* * *

_VI. Revelation  
_

"Ooh, ow—_ouch_. Are you almost set, Tony?"

An idle Wednesday morning finds Pepper on her feet. Though her legs are still as useless as the shoes she's wearing (flats for today instead of the usual monsters, to make the process easier), Tony has rigged a nifty machine that allows her to hoist herself into a standing position, holding on to a bar above her head as if she were preparing to do a set of chin-ups, until the machine can support her weight.

Tony marches about the garage, preparing for the weekly physical that the doctor had recommended they utilize to make sure all of Pepper is still in working order. Of course, the doctor had been referring to a simple reflex test, maybe even a blood test "if you think you have proper technology, Mr. Stark". Pepper, upon hearing _that_ gem, had had to press the side of her fist to her mouth to stifle a laugh. Doctor Morgan Stanley has no way of knowing, in his defense, that Tony has equipped his garage-slash-makeshift hospital with a full body scanner, X-ray machine, blood pressure and electrolyte testers—everything one could possibly need for a routine (or not so routine) checkup.

"Hold your horses, Pepper. I've just got to type in the… there we go." Tony straightens up from the control panel and turns around to look at his PA. The white lab coat that he's thrown on to make himself feel more official whips about his knees as he walks, and hangs open so that she can see the glowing reactor beneath his black beater. "How's that?"

With a sigh of relief, Pepper releases the bar and finds that the machine is holding her weight nicely, giving her the appearance of hovering inches above the ground. She seems unperturbed to the strange floating sensation caused by several powerful magnets, instead looking down at her hands and flexing her fingers to increase blood flow. They feel like lead. She flexes them some more.

"We have got to find a new way of doing that, Boss," she says. "I don't know how I managed to hold my weight up that long without my arms falling off. I definitely couldn't have done it before the accident."

Tony hates how they call what happened to her an "accident". Sure, it was accidental and unfortunate, but calling it an accident makes it seem so ordinary. He'd rather call it an incident. That word at least implies that there is someone to blame, or that it was out of the normal range of catastrophic damage. He fights off this surly thought with a swig of coffee and begins to go over the routine checkup that the two of them have become so accustomed to practicing. Test blood pressure levels, check hormone and blood chemical levels to see if the booster shots have been doing any good, feel progressively worse as Jarvis announces the tests to be negative, again. All part of the scientific process as Tony and Pepper have come to know it.

"Yeah, well I'll bet you didn't have to do any weight lifting before your spine was nearly crushed," says Tony, with his eyes glued to the computer screen as the machine dutifully hums its labor.

"Au contraire," replies Pepper with a grin, now setting her arms down by her sides as is customary during this checkup session. "I used to be the pushup champion at the gym, back in the day. Although I'm sure I could beat my record now, with all the wheelchair pushing I've been doing. The physical therapy has helped too," she adds, almost as an afterthought. She'd been doing all sorts of exercises to prevent muscle deterioration, including sets modified pushups and sit-ups that look so ludicrously sexual that she refuses to let Tony be around while she does them. But even those muscle-building practices don't compare to the strength she's gained simply by wheeling herself around.

Tony doesn't respond as he walks about the machines in long, quick strides. Much like the first time he performed a physical examination on his PA, he's got a pencil stuck behind one ear and a clipboard in hand. Unlike the first time they went through the exam, however, Pepper isn't fighting back tears. Medically speaking, she has nothing to cry about. Her fractures are healing as well as could be expected (better, even, because of Tony's vigilance). She feels wonderful inside and out—physically, emotionally—and her mother's latest shenanigans have not been able to affect her mood. Some time has passed since her mother and sister tried to force their way into the house, but the nonsense didn't stop there. Last night, she and Tony were watching Jim Cramer scream and rant about AIG when she received a phone call from the hospital; from what they told her, speaking in rushed tones, as if it were _she_ who caused all of this, her full set of medical records seems to have vanished. The last person to have the files was Doctor Stanley, when Pepper's mother had demanded to see them during a private appointment.

Tony seems to read her mind, looking up from his clipboard to comment, "I still can't believe those professional idiots let your mom get her hands on those records… and then they had the nerve to ask _me_ for backup information, after the hard time they gave us in the first place. I don't baffle easily, but I must admit… I am baffled. There's no other way to say it. The duplicity is overwhelming."

"Yes, well, it's to be expected, I guess. My lovely mother has a way of going over the top," Pepper responds, wincing as one of Tony's robots prods her in the side. She shoots it a glare and continues, "You really should give them that information, I think. It would benefit us in the long run."

He shakes his head in annoyance, but agrees. They lapse into a comfortable silence while he continues the exam, reading screen after screen of information, writing things down, sometimes threatening his robots when they don't follow his exact directions. Pepper observes all of this with affection, never voicing her amazement at his proficiency but appreciating it all the same. His ever-calculating mind is at its best down here, in the garage, where he makes great leaps in science with his inventions but never lets them leave the room. This strange body scanner she's in is a medical miracle all in its own; it could be worth millions, but Tony won't let it mainstream until he's sure it's flawless enough to bear the Stark emblem.

Setting down his clipboard at last, Tony turns to where Pepper is hovering as if weightless, and throws his arms wide.

"Everything looks perfect," he says with a shrug. He shakes his head, dropping his arms. "Everything but my boosters. They're not doing a damn thing. Peter checked my chemistry, he says it looks fine—even revolutionary—but something's not clicking."

Pepper frowns, though not solely for herself. She has become patient with these boosters as Tony works them out, albeit a little nervous that something will harm her more than she has already been harmed. As if being bound to a wheelchair is not enough, she doesn't particularly relish the idea of being brain dead, or permanently comatose. "You and Peter agreed that you need to—what was it you said—bring out the 'big dogs'? I forget exactly, but you get the point: maybe you just need a second opinion on the math."

"My math is never wrong," he mutters, more to himself than to her, but then he catches the unimpressed look on her face and adds, "but you're right. I do need a second opinion."

"Then get one. Here, help me down, I'm meeting Jim for lunch and it takes me forever and a half to get ready."

Tony punches in a few keys on one of many computers, then helps her down from his electro-contraption and into her wheelchair. While he turns off the machines, she reminds him of the luncheon he has to attend with his Freedom Project engineers, though she can't offer a good response when he asks why he has to waste company money by taking the office nimrods to a hibachi grill. She knows he'll end up enjoying the so-called 'business' meeting anyway, once the first few rounds of sake hit the table. They'll end up talking physics and he'll solve all their problems before they can even get their heads around the math. These men are the MIT and Stanford graduates, the best up-and-coming in their field, yet when Tony Stark enters the room they turn into a bunch of tittering schoolboys. Pepper's seen it. She wonders how impressed they'd be if she told them how he disintegrated her toast this morning while she was fixing his filing errors.

Tony rests a hand on her shoulder, giving her a gentle shove towards the elevator.

"Give Rhodey my best," he says lightly, already turning back to his work. "Tell him to get his ass over here for dinner sometime. I feel like I haven't seen him in years."

"Sure thing, Boss."

"Oh, and wait—!"

Pepper, with the elevator already closing her away from him, has to jab the silver 'door open' button to keep him in sight. Tony crosses the floor that lies between them, pulling a slip of paper out of his back pocket, and presses it into her outstretched palm.

"I need this book," he says casually, although there's that curious look on his face, the one that has never boded well with her in the past. "Can you pick it up on the way back? I know you have to go to the pharmacy to get that prescription, and the bookstore is just down the road…"

Suspicious, Pepper tears her eyes from Tony to unfold the note (which happens to be half a scrap of Stark Industries paper, complete with coffee stain) and reads the underlined title that lies amidst a series of scribbled math equations:

_Paraplegia for Dummies._

Tony Stark can build a suit of armor from scrap metal in a cave, right under the noses of terrorists with guns and God knows what else. He can turn a room full of the smartest men in Malibu into drooling fanboys. Hell, he can _fly_. But even the world's best and brightest sometimes need a Dummy's Guide. Pepper shakes her head, too preoccupied with being on time for her lunch date with Rhodey to think about why Tony doesn't look this sort of thing up on the internet, and slips the folded note into her breast pocket.

"Don't forget to go to your meeting," she says, looking up at him where he stands with one hand in his pocket and the fingers of his other hand tapping absently on his arc reactor. The _click-click-click_ sound of his bitten nails on the cover make her think, with a pang, of the sound her heels used to make on the floor as she chased him down the hall with a clipboard of unsigned paperwork.

Tony gives his head a nod to get a stray lock of hair out of his eyes, and offers her a half-smile.

"You know me, Potts. I never forget."

He might be joking, but as she lets the elevator take her up to the main floor, Pepper can't help but think that, at least recently, his statement holds an unsettling amount of truth. She hasn't had to chase him down to sign a single paper—not even the useless dress code memo that he has a tendency to neglect so that the woman at the front desk continues to wear a low-cut blouse with most of the buttons undone. For now, she pushes the thought aside, opting to focus on getting ready to leave. She sends Happy a quick text, checks her email (ten new messages since an hour ago, probably all from various board members in New York and Orlando), and heads to the shower.

ooo

Pepper finds Rhodey sitting at a table for two in the small, privately owned deli where they have arranged to meet. Forever in uniform, he sits straight-backed in his chair, his condensation-dotted glass of water untouched on its coaster. His serious aura eases up only when she wheels herself through the door and offers him a cheerful smile. Rhodey smiles back, waves with a slight movement of his hand.

"Long time no see, Pepper," he greets her, leaning one elbow against the plastic-coated armrest of his chair once she situates herself at the table. "How've you been?"

They take care of all the customary, somewhat awkward "How are you? Oh, I'm fine" chatter over salads, talk a little about the recent jump in S.I. stocks over the last few weeks, even discuss her therapy, and how Tony's been so uncharacteristically focused through all of this madness. That's when the real issue begins.

Rhodey waits until the waitress has served their meals and walked away from their table to voice his concerns about Tony.

"Listen, Pepper," he begins, taking a sip of water to buy himself time. Pepper eyes him, frowning and stirring the French Onion soup that she had so looked forward to all morning. She has a feeling that she might not be hungry much longer, not with the concern in Rhodey's voice. He continues in even tones, "I've been thinking about all of this, and I feel like I need to ask: what are you going to do about your housing situation?"

She's thrown so off guard by his question that she stares, dumbstruck with her spoon halfway to her mouth, for a good three seconds. It feels like a whole lot more.

"My… housing situation?"

"After all this has blown over, I mean," Rhodey clarifies. "You've been living at Tony's place for the last few months, and I was just wondering what you plan to do when you recover from the, uh, incident." He makes a vague gesture at her wheelchair.

Slowly, Pepper sets her spoon back into the soup bowl and sits back in her seat. Rhodey's question is not one that has never occurred to her in the past, but she tends to avoid it whenever the subject arises. In the beginning, when she was sitting in that itchy hospital bed, the idea of moving in with Tony—even for a period as short as six months—seemed inappropriate, absurd. In the first few weeks, she'd adapted to her new room and home office, but had still missed her cozy little apartment. Now she barely thinks of it at all, even though she still has to pay the rent on it every month. Rhodey responds to her silence by raising his eyebrows inquisitively at her.

"Have you thought about it at all?"

"Well, yes, but…" Pepper trails off.

"But?"

"I don't know, Jim," she replies at last, sighing. She shakes her head and turns to her soup, stirring it absently with her spoon. She had been right about her appetite. The wonderful, almost tangy aroma of her soup is not half as appealing as it had been when the waitress placed it in front of her. "I'm trying to take it a day at a time right now. It's a little overwhelming, trying to be at home—at Tony's house, I mean—and at work at the same time, doing the same amount of work with half the energy."

Rhodey doesn't seem convinced by her weak excuses, as much as she tries to push them. "But you haven't been doing the same amount of work, have you?" He presses through bites of his garlic chicken panini. "Tony's picked up some of the slack since you were in the hospital. I've seen his work desk, Pepper. It's _organized_. I don't have to nag him half as much as usual to get things done. He just _does_ it."

"What are you getting at?" says Pepper, apprehensive. She takes a nervous sip of water and tries not to notice how the ice clinks against the glass more than it should. "Do you think Tony doesn't need me anymore?"

There it is! That she should become disposable, or lose her place as Tony's unyielding lifeline, is her greatest fear, more even than the fear that she will never walk again. Her legs can be modified with some clever invention, if not healed altogether eventually. Should Tony continue on his path towards self-sufficiency at the rate he's been going, it's only a matter of time until he's making his own excuses and remembering business meetings. She feels the potential for loss more than ever as the words leave Rhodey's lips, as she sits across from him and frowns into her lukewarm soup (of which she has yet to take a single spoonful).

She _does_ still have work to do, of course. Tony can't run a company and still tinker around with her remedy (not to mention that he still goes overseas to fight crime whenever the need arises), but the work has been, admittedly, neither as stressful nor as rewarding. She sends a dozen emails but doesn't get that sense of accomplishment that used to follow a day of work. It may stem, in part, from the lack of that wonderful sigh of relief, the one she used to get from kicking off her four-inch heels at the end of a long day and dropping backwards onto the recliner in her apartment. More than that, though, is the absence of security. The potential to lose the job that she loves, exasperating as it is, when coupled with the potential to lose—dare she think it?—the man upon whose disorganization she relies…

Rhodey stares.

"I'm sure he does need you, Pepper. I know he does, in fact," he reassures her, reaching across the table to take hold of her hand. "I didn't mean to make you doubt…"

Pepper, looking up as she feels his warm hand take her cold one, lies, "I know he does." She smiles placidly, a forced smile that she's perfected after years of business meetings.

"Oh. Well, good then. I was just trying to figure out what you plan on doing once Tony fixes you up."

"I know I've been a bit of a burden on him these last few months, but it's a little soon to be making those sorts of plans. I assume that once everything's back to normal, I'll move back into my apartment and Tony will eventually drift back to his old habits."

"I don't think you've been a burden," Rhodey says decisively. He shakes his head as he takes another sip of water, peering at her over the rim of his glass. "How's his drinking been?"

"A little better—" she begins, but he cuts her off before she can elaborate.

"Has he done anything particularly reckless since you've been living there?"

"Well… no, but—"

"Has he missed a single meeting?"

"No, he hasn't!" Pepper sets her spoon down on the table. "But it's not all about me. You know how Tony is. He can do anything as long as it suits his agenda. Sooner or later, maybe a year from now, or even later, he'll revert. It's not like him to take care of himself when he has so many other things to do."

Pepper isn't sure whether she believes her own words, but the feeling she gets from saying them is bittersweet. The part about things going back to normal, at any rate, for when the time comes, she _will_ eventually stop calling the Malibu mansion her home. As much as she has been enjoying Tony's added presence in her life, and as lonely as her apartment will likely feel once she settles back in, Pepper realizes that she is in no position to get comfortable. And yet, Tony's been trying so much harder to do things right, and she'd hate to see him lose his progress.

"Exactly."

"My God, I am so confused. What are you saying?"

"I think you know what I'm saying, Pepper," says Rhodey. He then, having apparently decided that his message is clear, goes back to his panini. Pepper puts her face in her hands and sighs.

ooo

Pepper stops to pick up Tony's book on her way home, after swinging by the pharmacy for the prescription her doctor thinks will aid in strengthening her healed but fragile ribs. Lunch with Rhodey had been a little rougher than she'd anticipated, so the deluge of phone calls that swarms her phone is most welcome. She sits in the back of Happy's car, arguing with sleazy businessmen between stops to the pharmacy, book store, and, eventually, Tony's place. By the time the SUV pulls up the driveway, darkness has touched all corners of the city and the air has lost some its warmth, as if a cold front has begun to move in. Happy helps her out of the car and bids her goodbye, and within a minute she is quite alone, sitting just inside the front door of the house.

The lights are dimmed overhead in a way that casts the modern-designed hall in a warm, inviting light. Tony is nowhere to be seen—but then again, he rarely leaves his garage unless she is present, and even then his appearances can be both seldom and brief. If she listens through the low hum of the house's generators, Pepper can hear the ocean many feet below, crashing against the rocky base of the cliff. The house is often quiet like this, which is one of the many perks of its somewhat isolated location. She sometimes wonders if her boss has ever stopped to listen to the sounds of the waves as she does when she's wrapped in the sheets of her bed, drifting through the middle ground between sleep and consciousness. Likely he has, but she supposes that he didn't spend many nights alone before she moved in, and those where he _was_ he probably spent in the soundproof garage or passed out in a booze-induced stupor.

"Jarvis?"

"Yes, Miss Potts?"

"Is Tony out with the suit?" She doesn't like to say it in a way that suggests Tony is fighting and potentially harming himself or others. It's been a while since she had to dab Neosporin on his bleeding shoulders, and she likes to think that ignoring the truth behind his outings will maintain this absence of injury.

The A.I. responds in his familiar accent. "No, Miss Potts. Mr. Stark is currently in his workspace with an affiliate. I have informed him of your arrival, and he has instructed me to place an order for tonight's dinner. Would you like me to relay any messages to him?"

"No, but thank you, Jarvis."

"It's my pleasure, Miss Potts."

Happier in knowing that Tony is safe and not hundreds of miles away, duking it out with the world's most vile weapons dealers, Pepper wanders through the house without any particular intention. The workload for today is largely taken care of, save for a conference call that she needs to attend at eight with a liaison from Malcom Metals and a number of fast-talking lawyers from both companies. Otherwise, the night is hers. She would typically symbolize her approval by changing from her pencil skirt and blouse into something a little more casual, but she feels that it would be inappropriate with an "affiliate" in the house. To look anything less than professional could lead to uncomfortable questions and comments, or worse, a _tabloid publication_.

As if the face of Stark Industries isn't under enough pressure already, it makes Pepper's hands clench to think of some of the garbage people have published about her, and that it could actually affect the company. Once in a while she'll Google her own name and look for potential trouble. Mostly there is nothing to be concerned about; maybe a comment by some haughty journalist will strike her as particularly rude, but for the most part, the results are harmless. She _did_ once try searching Tony's name, only to accidentally stumble upon a rabid fan sight dedicated to Tony Stark pornography of all types, fictitious or otherwise. Red-faced, she'd quit the browser before she could see anything she might regret.

Now Pepper wheels up to her desk, unpacks her laptop, and checks her email. The number in the corner of her inbox begins to multiply, and she becomes happily immersed in her work until dinner.

ooo

"What'll ya have? Bourbon, coffee, Hawaiian Punch…?"

"Tea would be great, actually."

"You got it."

Tony heaves himself up and away from the paper-coated desk, where he has spent the last three hours pouring over countless sheets of intricate equations, some typed and others scrawled haphazardly on stationary, even a few written on restaurant napkins. Every single number, every decimal point, he's analyzing and examining and tearing apart and reconstructing to perfection. But, luckily for Tony, he is not alone in this exhausting endeavor. He turns away from the garage's "kitchen" counter after a few minutes with a steaming Stark Industries mug in either hand, and passes one to his affiliate and friend as he sits back down.

Taking the mug with a word of thanks, Reed Richards doesn't look up from the envelope upon which Tony has scribbled out a complicated proportion. So far, neither man has found any significant error—no errors at all, actually—in any of the formulas.

Tony's neck aches from leaning over the paperwork so long. He stretches in his chair, arching backwards until his muscles catch and he shivers visibly. Reed has shown no such qualms, but it must be different for him, Tony thinks. The guy can stretch however far he wants, whenever he wants. The joy of it probably isn't the same.

"How's Sue and the family?" asks Tony, not keen on getting back to the equations after several hours of nonstop reading. A solid five minutes of rest are in order.

"Sue's well. The family's well," replies Reed, turning another sheet over on the table. "Sue says I have a tendency to become distant when I'm doing the whole 'save the planet' thing, so I've been trying to spend extra time with them. How's Pepper, aside from what I'm looking at here?" He gestures towards Pepper's medical file with one hand.

Shrugging, Tony replies, "She's fine, I guess. She'd probably be better if I hadn't almost gotten her killed, but you know… I guess we all have our bad days."

Reed looks up at the tone of spite in Tony's voice, frowning thoughtfully. "Are you still letting the past rule how you feel?"

"If you mean constantly thinking about the guilt, then yes." Tony takes a gulp of tea with the bitter air of self-loathing that tends to attack him whenever he thinks about the incident. "It's taken over my life, Reed."

"How so?"

Reed pays Tony his full attention now. He sets his pencil down and doesn't react when it falls over the edge of the desk and rolls away. Tony can feel that odd, constricting sensation in his chest, which doesn't make him want to discuss his personal ailments any more than he already does.

"Well, for starters," Tony begins, straightening the unbuttoned collar of his shirt in a most dignified manner, "I haven't had sex in almost three months."

"How does that even relate to Pepper?" asks Reed, taken aback.

"_Because_—" He pauses, eyebrows furrowing as he tries to put his jumbled thoughts into a coherent line. Having never vocalized his concerns before now, it takes him a few moments to figure out what he's trying to say. "I feel guilty whenever I think about going out and spending the night with some nameless woman. I think of Pepper and I can't bring myself to do it."

"Pepper's been injured since July, though. Since it's November, that means you've been able to get over at least once, right?"

"Yeah, well, when's the last time _you_ went for three months without getting laid, Reed?"

"Point taken."

"And I felt worse afterwards anyway," Tony adds. He raises the mug to his lips to take a sip, but the scent of lemon tea suddenly makes him feel sick. The idea of eating or drinking anything (except maybe a scotch) makes his stomach clench. "And then Pepper's crazy mother kept accusing me of trying to kill her, and it was just one of those ugly situations where you _know_ she's wrong, but at the same time you can't convince yourself."

When Reed doesn't offer him any words, Tony keeps going. It almost feels good to talk about it. What's haunted him for so many months has begun to rise to the surface, threatening to overflow from his mouth in one big outpouring of word-vomit. The scalding porcelain of his coffee mug keeps him from slipping into silence, because if he does, he's not going to be able to talk about it again. Tony confessing his innermost thoughts (without the aid of his liquid courage, no less!) is a rare and strange occurrence. So he tightens his hands around the mug, regardless of how much it burns, and presses onward.

"After the… _incident_, I spent an entire week in a drunken stupor. I'm surprised that I still have a liver, quite frankly. But when Jim Rhodes told me that she was coming around, I—" Tony breaks off, shaking his head at the ceiling in disbelief. "It was the single most frightening and wonderful thing I've ever felt. And then, the first time she tried to stand up and ended up on the ground… I freaked out. From the moment I scraped her off the sidewalk to right now, I've been pounded with guilt." Now leaning the side of his face against his hand, he presents Reed with a look of solid resignation. "I need to make things right. I can never forgive myself unless I do."

With his eyes cast down into his tea, Tony hears rather than sees Reed heave an audible sigh. He taps a finger against the side of his searing mug, watches the clear ripples spread out over the surface, then hit the barrier and bounce back. And bounce back. And back. He can feel the silence pressing down on him from everywhere, inside and out.

Finally comes the hesitant response: "I'm not sure this is even about you, Tony."

Startled, Tony snaps up, nearly knocking over his mug in the process.

"What?"

Suddenly he feels himself standing in the blocked alley with Pepper, feels the weight of the Iron Man on his shoulders as she shouts, frustrated, _"Tell me something. Why does it always have to be about _you_, Tony?"_ Her flushed cheeks and torn skirt are as vivid in the memory as when the event took place, even if their surroundings have blurred with time. The effect is… well, it's startling, for starters.

"I don't mean to offend you, of course," Reed adds hastily, taking the look on Tony's face for one of a man affronted.

"No, no, that's not—" In the midst of his flashback, Tony can barely form a coherent thought. Pepper's words keep ringing in his ears as if he's experienced some sort of epiphany, or found a long-lost connection to the past. "What do you mean, exactly?"

"I mean that I think your motives are confused. You've spent months slaving over this problem as if it's to satisfy a need of your own. But look at it from, say, my perspective. Even if you _are_ responsible for her injuries—and I'm not saying you are, Tony. That's a completely separate and debatable topic—but even if you were responsible, you could have handled it in so many different ways." Reed reaches across the room and picks up the escaped pencil without rising from his chair. "You could have left her to the hands of the doctors, since they're obviously more experienced in the medical field than you are. You could have funded the project and research, or even taken a part in it. Sooner or later, Pepper probably would be on her feet again."

"Yeah, _maybe_," Tony interjects, rolling his eyes towards the ceiling. "But I don't work with maybies."

"Exactly!" says Reed, and turns back to the sheet of paper he had been surveying before Tony's comment. "So you took an active role in her recovery. From my perspective, all I see is a guy so determined to help one woman that he moves her into his house and single-handedly spends months on a solution that may or not work, just so she can go back to living a normal life. You've changed your living habits because you want her to be comfortable and happy, and stopped indulging in casual sex because your conscience says it's wrong. Tony… that doesn't sound like something one person—you in particular—would do for just anybody."

"Pepper isn't just anybody." Tony's watching Reed work, taking in his words, considering each of them with the same sort of care he might use while handling active explosives. "She and I have worked together a long time. She's been putting up with my bullshit for years, and even now that I have a secret identity, she's still right beside me, every time I do something stupid. Press conferences, business stuff, whatever. Pepper's more than just another employee."

Reed looks up from the paper, the tip of his pencil hovering over the sheet like a snake waiting to strike its dinner. "Would you like my honest opinion?"

"Well, I didn't bring you all the way from the New York City to be my shrink, but since you're here, you might as well get that session in, too."

"Okay." There is a pause, in which Tony is certain that he can feel his heartbeat sending waves up through his arms and into the table. Then, after a few moments of pensive thought, comes Reed's statement: "I think that you're giving guilt too much credit for all the work you've done here. This concoction is absolutely brilliant, Tony—" Reed holds up a fistful of papers before letting them fall back into the mountainous pile on the table, "But I don't think it's the labor of remorse. I think you're confusing guilt with something else, something more powerful."

Tony stares. His brain is whirring at top speed, struggling to process the enormity of Reed's words and eventually coming to one gut-wrenching conclusion. He can't say it aloud, but he understands it the moment he reaches into his mental bank of previously unused words and pulls out the one that fits. The one word that changes everything, from his perspective on the past few months of his life to that horrible moment on the hot city streets of southern California, when Pepper was lying on the ground with blood in her hair and he was sure that it meant the end of her, the end of everything.

"_Even if it's not for yourself, somehow you always make it personal,"_ she'd snapped. _"Why is that, Tony?"_

Because, as he's beginning to realize, this time it _is_ personal. It is. And then again, it isn't. Tony Stark, in all his ingenuity, can do nothing when confronted with this life-changing truth but put his face in his hands and sigh.

Reed says nothing for the next few minutes, for which Tony is grateful. After a long, full silence, the former makes a small murmur of recognition and Tony looks up, dazed but curious, at the sound.

"What? What is it?" Tony asks, emerging from the fog.

Reed raises his eyebrows, makes a mark on one sheet of notes with his pencil, and then slides the sheet across the table. Tony feels that his hands are sweating as he lifts the page of numbers and finds Reed's notation.

"The six in the hundred-thousandth's place of decimal ninety-eight should actually be a five," says Reed, evidently satisfied with his handiwork because he leans against his seat and arches backwards as Tony had done before—only when Reed does it, his arms reach the ceiling. "I guess it's a good day for revelations all around."

"I knew they called you Mr. Fantastic for a reason." Tony's already wiping his hands on his jeans and rising from the table. Reed follows suit a moment later, pushing the wheelie chair neatly into place, and the men head upstairs together. "Sometimes you can actually be pretty smart, when you put the effort into it."

"You're hilarious."

ooo

The boy who drops off dinner isn't too happy to see Pepper when she opens the door of the mansion and wheels on to the front step with her checkbook perched, open, on her lap. For one, he's wearing an apron, and has a smear of what looks like pasta sauce all over the side of one sleeve. Coupled with the distinct frown pasted on his face, Pepper finds him to be both alarming and amusing.

"I didn't know Bianchi's had a delivery service," she says with genuine interest when she reads the print on the boy's apron.

The annoyed response is, "We don't. Whoever placed the order offered to pay a hundred dollars extra for delivery, so they made me drive it over. I'm a dishwasher."

"Oh! I'm sorry about that."

"It's a hundred and fifty-seven dollars and eleven cents."

Only Tony would pay a hundred fifty seven and eleven cents for some calzones and garlic bread, Pepper thinks as she writes out the check and signs it with her neat, curving signature. She passes it to the would-be delivery boy, then as an afterthought takes a twenty-dollar bill from her purse and presses it into his hand. The boy, as a consequence, leaves in higher spirits and Pepper feels less snobbish for making him drive all this way so that she can eat.

On her way to the kitchen, Pepper nearly plows someone over as he appears unexpectedly at the top of the staircase, and the only way she manages _not_ to crash into him with her wheelchair is by grabbing the wheels in both hands and allowing the box of food to topple from her lap. She gasps in surprise and mingled horror as the box, as if in slow motion, flies towards the ground. But before it reaches its untimely doom, the man reaches out with one arm and snatches her dinner from mid-air.

"Careful, Pepper!" says the man, cheerfully.

Pepper needs a moment to register the man's blue full-body spandex and gray-streaked hair before she exclaims, surprised, "Reed! How are you?"

She accepts the box from his outstretched hand with a word of thanks. Tony emerges from the staircase next, and in her initial, pleasant surprise at seeing Reed (who, unlike in the case of Spider-Man, she's met on multiple occasions), does not notice the curious manner in which Tony looks at her. For some time they stand in the foyer and make small talk, about Reed's workings up in the Big City, of Sue, of Pepper's adaptations and how she's been dealing with her ailments. Before long, Reed makes his exit, politely turning down the invitation to stay for dinner with the explanation that he needs to get home to his wife, who "will likely strangle me if I'm not home for supper".

And on that note, he shakes their hands one last time and leaves through the back door of the house, where Happy is waiting with the car. While he is claiming to have nothing personal to do with the Iron Man, Pepper pointed out to him after the Spider-Man visit, it is probably in Tony's best interests not to have super heroes strolling in and out of the mansion through the front door. Together Pepper and Tony watch through the newly-repaired window until Happy's sleek SUV rounds the corner and fades into the dark.

Pepper cranes her neck backwards to put Tony in her line of sight, for he's standing behind her with his hands shoved into his pockets.

"How'd it go?" she asks, anxious behind her façade of calm.

"Marvelously," he replies, looking down at her.

"Would you like to join me for dinner?"

Tony pulls a hand from his pocket and rests it on her shoulder. She almost jumps at the touch, but manages to halt any reaction by tightening her grip on the heavenly-smelling box of food that sits, hot, on her knees.

"What do you think about dinner and a movie?" he asks. "I'll have Jarvis put a cult classic up on the big flat screen and we can throw popcorn at the TV whenever someone says a stupid line."

Pepper smiles. "Sounds like a date."

"Hey, don't get ahead of yourself, Potts. Dates aren't dates unless they end with your clothes on my bedroom floor."

"Or on your ceiling fan, more likely," she jests, shrugging his hand off of her shoulder. "Besides, my new prescription would knock me out long before the point where clothes are usually thrown around. I think it's best if we just worry about dinner tonight. We can watch a movie as long as the state of my clothing isn't put into jeopardy."

"I could make it quick if you like," says Tony as she begins to move from her spot in front of the window. "You won't even know what hit you—_ach!_"

In the process of backing up, Pepper _accidentally_ lets the wheel of her chair roll over Tony's foot. Grinning, she heads back to the kitchen, the scent of fresh Italian food following her down the stretch of hallway. Tony hops on one foot briefly, cursing under his breath, before following his triumphant PA out of the foyer.

ooo

They do end up watching a movie after dinner, a black-and-white French film called "_La Grande Illusion_". Tony's feet are propped up on the coffee table, while Pepper keeps her hands folded on her lap so that she can't accidentally brush her boss's leg when she moves around. At first, Tony objects to watching a movie in French, claiming that having to read subtitles takes away from the experience, but Pepper shushes him and soon enough he's so absorbed in the movie that he misses his mouth when trying to take a sip of scotch and pours it all down the front of his shirt.

The couch shifts beneath her as Tony, swearing at his own inattention, tells Jarvis to pause the movie so that he can pour himself another drink.

"What do you want to have, Pep?" he asks as he strides over to a mini-fridge disguised as a cabinet.

Though Pepper, who hasn't had anything stronger than a glass of wine in the last five months, would very much like to indulge in a nice drink before bedtime, the labels of her countless prescriptions flash before her eyes and she has to decline. When she tells Tony that she'll just have an ice water, he calls her a buzz kill.

"Tony, I'm fairly certain that if you were ever gravely wounded, you wouldn't make it a week," she sighs, accepting the glass he offers her before he plops back onto the couch. Pepper, without the stability of her lower half, bumps against Tony and almost spills both of their drinks again. "Not from the injuries, but from the combination of prescription medicine and alcohol."

This jibe he does not appreciate, though he pretends that it doesn't affect him like it does.

"Well then let's hope it never comes to that," he says dismissively, taking a sip without glancing at his frowning assistant. Then, turning his attention to the flat screen: "Jarvis, rewind to the beginning of the play scene. I have no idea what just happened or why those men are crossdressing."

The movie resumes and Pepper does her best to get into it, but she has a difficult time regaining her focus now that it's been disrupted. She can smell the spilled liquor on Tony's shirt, and though she disapproves of his routine nightcaps, the scent keeps him on her mind despite her best efforts. She leans away from him, propping her elbow on the armrest of the couch, but can still feel his low laughter as he watches the soldiers on screen dance and sing in women's clothing. In her struggle to pay as little attention to him as possible, she doesn't see when Tony glances at her, eyes her profile for a few seconds, and then sets his drink to the side.

Just before the end of the movie, Jarvis announces that there's been an altercation in the Middle East, one potentially involving salvaged S.I. weaponry. Tony's on his feet so fast that this time Pepper _does_ topple sideways into his empty seat, unable to stabilize herself fast enough against the armrest of the couch.

"How long ago, Jarvis?" demands Tony, checking his watch.

"Only a few minutes, Sir. If you hurry you can get there before the situation reaches the media."

"Get the suit ready. I'll be down in literally thirty seconds."

The hem of Pepper's skirt has slipped up her thigh and she pulls it back down, feeling that sense of detachment from her own body that comes from not feeling; she might as well be tugging someone else's skirt back into place, for she does not experience the sensation of the fabric sliding over her skin and pack into place. This unpleasant thought does nothing to make her feel any better about Tony and his situation. Quite the opposite, it only furthers the looming sense of desperate fear in the pit of her stomach. It makes her think of her dream, the dream that Tony _does_ come back from his mission, but so damaged that she can do nothing but cry at his side while he slips away.

Tony turns to where Pepper has just heaved herself back into a sitting position and adjusted her rumpled clothes.

"I'll be back soon."

He always says that, and usually when he does return, it's hours later and he's so battered and exhausted that he doesn't make a single lewd comment while she tends to his wounds. But what can she say? That she doesn't want him to go because she had a dream once that he was injured more than usual?

Because Tony does not belong to her, and because Pepper does not feel entitled to voice the selfish desire that he abandon his duty and stay home, stay safe with her, all she can say is, "Ok."

"Don't wait up for me, Pepper."

"Please be careful, Tony."

Tony offers Pepper a half-smile that he probably thinks is reassuring, then tears his eyes away from where she sits, looking as small as she feels, and heads downstairs.

Pepper turns to the window, where outside it has begun to rain. The clouds drop pinpricks onto the window, and the drops of water bead up and roll down until they drip, drip, drip their way down to the ocean. She watches from the couch until she hears the unmistakable sound of the garage door and sees a brief streak of red and gold strike fire across the overcast sky.

Silence again.

ooo

oo

* * *

A/n: So, there it is! More now then ever, feedback is appreciated while I try to get back into the swing of things. If you caught anything that rubbed you the wrong way, let me know. If you DID like it, let me know! By the end of the story I should be back on par with where I was before.

Thanks again to cardxiv (whose work you can find on the tonypepper livejournal community), and to you, the reader, for coming back for more!


	7. Reparation

A/n: Posted in a somewhat timely manner? I like to think so, given that in between this chapter and the last was Thanksgiving, tons and TONs of work, and not having time. BUT, to my merit, I was working diligently on this.

Many thanks to the wonderful cardxiv, who beta-d this story and with tender loving care. :) Her edits are what make this story readable.

Disclaimer: I own nothing but the errors, and am making no profit off of this story.

Happy Reading!

* * *

_VI. Reparation  
_

The nighttime finds Pepper lying in her queen-sized bed with her hair spread over the pillow like a red cloud, her eyes turned upwards as she watches the flashes of lightning dance across her ceiling. Her efforts to get some rest prove futile, for though the label on her prescription warns her against operating any heavy machinery (_like what, a __motor wheelchair?_ she wonders bitterly), she cannot close her eyes long enough to even begin to feel the side effects. Tony departed hours ago, left her sitting awkwardly on the couch to finish the movie by herself and clean up their leftovers . But her restlessness doesn't stem from resent—cleaning the dishes is one of the less offensive jobs he's put in her hands over the past years—it's from a nauseating, mind-boggling fear. She wills herself not to think of Tony, not to connect him with this storm because its irrational and its probably not raining wherever he is, a thousand miles away in a windswept desert, blowing things up…

"I can't do this."

Frustrated and sighing, Pepper heaves herself upright, grabs her bathrobe from where it hangs on the bedpost, and pulls it on over her t-shirt before somehow managing to maneuver into her wheelchair without toppling to the ground in a heap of entangled limbs and blankets. If she's going to be awake, she might as well sit somewhere where she can watch the storm to its fullest extent. So she goes into the living room and parks herself in front of the wall that is actually a window, pulling her robe more tightly around her shoulders to protect against the windless chill.

Tony departed hours ago. Pepper sits and watches for a sign—a streak of color, the sound of the garage again, any indicator, really. But there is nothing for it. There is only the sound of the waves and the hum of the house's generators and her own quivering sigh as she rubs her temples and wonders _Why am I so worried this time?_ The sleepy effects of the medicine pull her in one direction, and the weather and its secret messages tug her in the other. Pepper finds herself trapped, exhausted, suffocating under the pressure of deadly potential.

She wonders if all the wives of other vigilantes—or of any soldier, since they are fighters all the same—must experience this stress. Twisting her fingers in her lap, she wonders why she's never been this concerned. Sure, she used to bite her lip and fear for Tony while he went on his missions, but this time it's different. When she closes her eyes, Pepper thinks of Tony in the desert, lying in a scrap of a suit as she had lain amidst the rubble of a broken building, staring up at the hot sun and thinking, as she had thought, _'I am going to die—' _

"Pepper?"

She twists around in her chair so fast that she almost knocks it over. At first she's not sure whether the figure silhouetted at the top of the stairs is actually a person or just a figment of her exhausted, heavily medicated imagination, and she thus spends a good ten seconds staring with her mouth hanging open in surprise before she decides that it—that _he_—must be real.

Pepper feels as if she's been kicked in the stomach, and the sensation is a new one. She wants to shout at him for daring to be gone for so long, and for coming back without warning. She would also like to burst into tears, and to find her blackberry and start lecturing him about tomorrow's meetings, and to listen to every blood-spattered detail about his supposed battle against evil. All this, all these emotions, rise up as if they're filling a balloon in her chest, and yet she can do nothing but stare. Tony takes the step from the stairwell and into the room, squinting at where she sits silently in the dark with her eyes as round as his arc reactor and her hand over her heart.

Slowly moving forward, approaching her as one approaches a wounded animal, he asks, "Shouldn't you be sleeping?"

He's wearing the pair of navy sweatpants that he likes to don whenever he returns from the Middle East, and nothing else. The arc reactor glows soft and blue in the darkness of the room, his hair is damp with sweat and sticking in all directions. A towel hangs around his neck, white and—dare she believe it?—free of the usual scarlet stains. He looks like he might have just finished enjoying a pleasant, warm shower.

"Potts, it's four in the morning. Are you nuts?"

"I was—just—" Pepper tears her eyes from their business of wound-searching and sets them on her reflection in the window. "Watching the storm."

Pepper feels herself tense up as Tony approaches, and immediately forces herself to calm down again. It's going to be all right, she thinks. She was just worried and now that Tony's back home, unscathed, she can relax. She'll excuse herself in a few minutes, climb into bed, and pass out as she should have done when he left her to finish _La Grande_ _Illusion _by herself. In those moments that follow, while they wait in darkness punctuated only by occasional white flashes from outside and Tony's permanent night light, they regard one another in a solemn silence. Outside, the storm is already beginning to move out across the water, fading as her panic fades, blurring…

"How did it go?" she asks quietly, turning to get a good glimpse at her boss and frowning when she catches sight of an all too familiar glass in his hand.

Tony shrugs in response, ignoring her look of disapproval.

"You seem all right," she observes in a murmur, and is glad to find that she means it.

"It was nothing." Tony takes a sip and glowers down at the contents of the glass, as if it has offended him somehow. "Although I suspect that the worst has yet to happen."

"Meaning?"

"They had _some_ weapons, but not even close to the number or manpower I'd predicted. I'll have it figured out in a few days."

She'll take his words for it this time, for now that the adrenaline has begun to ebb out of her system, the pills are starting to take over. Pepper allows herself to feel relief, sleepiness, Tony's low voice rolling over her head and shoulders.

"I used to be afraid of thunder," Tony mutters, almost inaudibly. Pepper makes a thoughtful, drowsy '_hmm'_ in response.

What he doesn't mention is that he actually feared storms until he was twenty, when he was caught in a nasty one while trying to drive home drunk on his parents' death day anniversary. It had been one of his more dangerous moves, though admittedly he hadn't planned the storm to start up as he was leaving the bar after a night of binge drinking by himself. He'd almost gotten himself killed—had probably only survived because he pulled over on the highway to throw up. He'd toppled out of the car and, after his body rejected the countless beers all over the grass, crawled away until he tumbled into a muddy ditch. All he can remember is the amazement he'd felt while staring up into the downpour, the sensation of being so close to destruction but never quite reaching it. Even now he can see the bolts of lightning, can feel the ground trembling beneath him, threatening to kill him but never coming close.

"Not anymore, though. The storm's over now, Pepper."

He's faced worse fears by now. When put up against death, torture, and being shot at from all sides, the fear of nature takes a back seat on his list of worries. Thunderstorms seem more like a pleasant, structured interlude in a chaotic universe. The enormity is stunning, and seeing lightning strike across the ocean, as he does now, renders him speechless. A tremulous but distant rumble echoes off the mansion's sturdy walls, and at the sound he cannot help but think of his own troubles, of Reed's pointed comments down in the garage. Tony scratches at a healing scab behind his ear and sighs.

Whether he hasn't yet recuperated from his flight across the world, or if the rainfall has simply put him in a state of resignation, he begins to feel overwhelmed by the need to _know_.

"Pepper. I need to ask you someth—"

He turns to face her, to make his statement and expose his heart for the first time, and finds that somewhere along the line, Pepper finally let it go and allowed exhaustion to overcome her. Tony can't help but let a trace of a smile curl on his mouth at the sight of her asleep in her chair, her head lolling on her shoulder and the red of her bathrobe clashing magnificently with her long, loose hair.

_It can wait._ It's probably for the better is he doesn't spring his feelings on her all at once, as much of a pain in the ass—among other places—it is to repress them. Especially since neither of them has had enough sleep, and Pepper's never been the impulsive type, like he is.

Wordlessly, Tony finishes off the last of his water in one gulp, sets the crystal on the nearest table, and lifts Pepper from her wheelchair.

Her weight in his arms stands as a reassurance that she will still be here tomorrow, the same Pepper, the same… Tonight, she can sleep. As for tomorrow, he thinks—who knows, really?

ooo

Tony trips and falls while running up the stairs on the morning that follows his return from the Middle East. This slip-up he attributes to sheer excitement, though it might rather have something to do with the little fact that he hasn't slept in over twenty-four hours and is borderline insane with tired. But those are just details—largely unimportant, and he doesn't bother reflecting on it as he picks himself off the stairs and half runs, half limps towards Pepper's room.

"Pepper!"

Without regard to his usual respect for her privacy, he runs straight into her bedroom, bent over and rubbing the spot on his shin that tangled with the staircase moments before. He straightens up, takes a look around the room, and realizes that she's not in here. The bed has been made up already, the white sheets tucked, impeccably neat, under the bottom of her mattress. In a sleep-deprived tizzy, Tony doesn't stop to look around as he might normally do, to admire the little touches of herself that Pepper has added to the room. Instead he heads straight for her private bathroom, from where the pattering sound of running water drifts in an a-patterned hum. Not thinking about the possible consequences of his actions, Tony grabs the door handle and twists.

It's locked, of course.

_What was I thinking!_ He scolds himself, pulling his hand back as if the doorknob had seared him. _She'd killed me if I walked in on her naked, dripping—okay, never mind that. Focus!_

Tony knocks with the side of his fist, calling her name through the door. The A.I. is the one to respond.

"How might I help you, Sir?"

Dumbly, and realizing how stupid he sounds after the words leave his mouth, he asks, "Can I come in?"

"Sir, Ms. Potts is currently in the shower, and has instated a strict 'no-Stark-entry' policy. Only in the case of nuclear warfare or her personal injury, i.e. a fall, may you enter this room, as per her specific orders—"

"Okay, okay! Can it, Jarvis. Agh—" Tony paces away from the door and then marches back, tugging at the shorter hairs on the back of his head. "Okay. Just—tell her—that I need to talk to her asap, got it?"

A pause follows, then: "Ms. Potts agrees to your request, and will contact you promptly."

"Good. Thank you, Jarvis."

"Certainly."

ooo

Pepper is scrubbing shampoo into her hair when Jarvis's pleasant voice addresses her from invisible speakers.

"Ms. Potts, Mr. Stark would like permission to enter."

The sudden voice startles her into letting a blob of lather drip into her eye, where it stings like hell and makes her curse fluently under her breath.

"He _what?_"

Jarvis repeats the message, to which Pepper responds with a blank stare before ultimately telling the A.I. to respond with her usual shower policy. In the silence that ensues, she gingerly rubs the soap out of her eye and waits for the follow-up with a mix of confusion and curiosity. Tony's never gone as far as entering her bedroom before, and the thought that he just tried to gain entry to her in the shower makes for an interesting situation. When eventually Jarvis returns with an answer, she's not sure what to make with it.

"Mr. Stark requests that you speak with him as soon as possible."

Well, that answer is simple enough, though it creates more questions than it answers. Instead of rushing to finish her shower, though, as she would do in any other situation, she slows down, her fingers still entangled in the red clump of hair that sits atop her head. It's probably the booster again, she thinks, or that he has to be across the world in two hours and needs her to cancel today's important meeting with PR from China. In either scenario, she maintains some level of doubt. If it's a scheduling conflict, she'll sigh and tell him to be careful and follow her orders like a good assistant, then jump right into her inbox and battle the board members with figurative sword and shield. After that it simply becomes the process of waiting around again, worried sick from feelings she's not altogether ready to face.

If it's the booster...

Pepper sighs, dropping her hands and tilting her head back under the spigot. If it's the booster, then there's that cumbersome combination of hopefulness, apprehension, and downright dread to deal with. The knowing look on Jim Rhodes's face stands as ever-clear in her mind as the nagging sensation in her gut. Pepper sits under the showerhead designed to simulate rainfall and lets the water run over her like the real thing.

As soon as she's toweled off and slipped into her bathrobe (which reminds her that she woke up in her bed this morning, still wearing the robe and uncertain of how she'd gotten there), Pepper pages Tony over the intercom. When she asks what he needs, he asks if she's still naked.

"Am I still—? I'm not going to dignify that question with a response, Mr. Stark."

"I'll take that as a yes, and I'll be there in about five seconds."

Pepper reasons that she probably shouldn't be caught off guard like she is, not with all the surprises Tony's sprung on her during their many (happy?) years. But there it is. Same countless years later and he can still make her eyebrows shoot almost clear off her forehead.

Alarmed by his response, she only has time to pull the towel from the top of her head before her bedroom door opens and in he strides, with telltale circles beneath his eyes and so unperturbed by the mop of hair hanging about her face that he seems as if he's seen it a hundred times. Tony allows himself a moment to appreciate the sight of his lovely, scowling PA, all skin but for the bathrobe she's clutching about herself in order to salvage the last threads of her dignity. Pepper wonders at what point exactly did they cross the line. It's definitely been crossed, but usually _she_ is the witness to unseemliness… though he seems to mind seeing her in her bathrobe far less than she minded when she walked in on him in the hot tub with the Maxim cover twins.

"What is it, Tony?" she asks, a little tartly because she's trying to hold the top of her bathrobe shut while simultaneously fumbling around for the Blackberry that's slipped between the side of the wheelchair and the seat cushion.

"I've got it, Pepper," he replies, and at his tone she looks up from her search and realizes that he's practically dancing in place with excitement. It's a bit like seeing a toddler on Christmas, only this toddler has a goatee and towers over her.

Tony's enthusiasm begins to spread across the gap between them, but still she finds herself holding her breath against the contagion.

_Don't hope _too_ much now, Pepper_, she warns herself. It has the potential to be a very damaging hope, if she believes in it too much and it fails. Or, she thinks, if it succeeds. She feels like she's poised at the top step with her wheelchair edging precariously over, waiting for that one slip.

Rather than further explore these fears, Pepper looks up at her boss through a curtain of tangled hair and says, serene, "That's great! When do you want to implement it?"

"Right now. We're gonna do it right now. I need you to call Rhodey for me while I start setting up."

As if on cue, her hand finally closes on her escaped phone and she starts dialing before it even hits the light. But just as she raises the receiver to her ear, Jarvis interrupts their prospective conversation with the announcement that the remainder of the pilfered S.I. weapons has been traced to the Ivory Coast. Tony's grin melts away so quickly that I might never have been there. He pulls his hands from where they've been stuffed in his grease-smeared jeans and rubs the sides of his face in frustration. His fingers find their way into his hair and tug, frustrated.

Pepper, sensing danger, jumps in before he can begin pulling out his hair. "Tony, it's fine. I know you're dying to do this now, but it can wait. Iron Man can't."

"I know, I know," he groans. "It's fine. I'll just get it over with and be back in a few hours."

"Are you sure you're okay, because you don't look like—"

"I'm okay."

Tony drops his hands, takes a breath, surveys Pepper a second time. She, ready to work even before she's gotten dressed, with her Blackberry poised to strike at his command. He sighs.

"Jarvis, prep the suit for launch. Pepper, I need to you push all my appointments back until later tonight."

He's turning away already, but even so, Pepper can't help but marvel that Tony actually still plans on _going_ to these meetings. She means to ask him about a time estimate, but he's gone by the time she looks up from finding the PR desk in her address book. Out the door without a backwards glance or a goodbye.

Ah well, it's still an improvement.

ooo

_That old score again._

Pepper intends to spend the afternoon on the phone with the board for an hour, followed by what her doctor calls "therapeutic" sudoku—as if she hasn't got enough to worry about!—to calm what will inevitably be frazzled nerves. Afterward, she has to call PR again to make sure Tony's up to date on the record workings before his video conference with the head of the Chinese S.I. branch, whose name she spent twenty minutes repeating to herself in the bathroom mirror this morning, just to make sure she's getting it right. Her home office is as crisp and tidy as her freshly-pressed business suit and she's ready to go. She's the one pulling the strings on the business puppets and no one, she knows, can turn a situation like Virginia Potts.

Except once she completes her sudoku at exactly 4:30 and sets down her pen, it occurs to her that when Tony had left her this morning, he hadn't dictated exactly _when_ he plans on returning for work. And he can be just about anywhere—literally on mars if he felt the need to be there. He'd been really good about attending things recently, sure, but what was it that guy had said about putting too much faith into any one person—? "Have trust, but cut the cards," or something similar. If he's not on that video conference by six… well, Pepper supposes that she's smoothed over worse, but this _is_ China, and he knows better than to screw up their negotiations.

Pepper scoops her phone up off the edge of her desk and dials his number, and is for some reason not surprised when he doesn't answer, even though he _always_ answers, no matter who or what he's doing at the moment, if just to spite her for calling. Call it instinct or just that she knows him better than anyone, but she's already upset with herself for taking his departure so easily. After last night, when she was a wreck, this time she just smiled and nodded and let him limp out the door (_why _had_ he been limping, anyway?_ Pepper wonders. _He was fine last night…_). That voice mail recording—the one with Tony saying that he's either away from his phone or doesn't want to talk to you—is not normal, nor is that chill that shoots up her back as she makes the fleeting connection to a certain nightmare she'd had not so long ago. Before she has time to realize, or to pick up her phone from where she's discarded it on her lap, everything falls to madness.

First there's the noise. It's loud and clear and she doesn't even need to turn around and look because she already knows what it means. The sweat on her palms is the same as it was in her nightmare, slick on the armrests of her chair. Her hesitation is the same, as split-second as it is, before she turns around and rolls into the living room with her heart's pounding deafening her ears.

Tony's sprawled out on the back porch, face-down and helmeted against the solid concrete of his patio. He's not in pieces as he had been in her dream—Thank God, _oh thank God_—but rather in one scratched, battered lump. One of his arms is twisted up about his head in a way that turns her stomach over. Stopping her chair just at the door, Pepper slides the glass panel sideways with the effort of both hands and calls out his name.

No response comes, though this isn't much of a shock. She shouts for Jarvis to call Jim and get him here right away, then almost jumps in surprise when the automated butler responds in acquiescence. So far, so good. Quietly she turns back to her boss.

"Tony?"

Pepper hears the extent of his trauma before she sees it. Tony does not move beneath his helmet and twisted-up armor, but somehow he has the strength to let a long, broken groan run from his mouth, to her prickling ears, down past the collar of her blouse and streak down the back of her neck.

What strikes her as uncanny in all of this is not that he sounds as if his mouth is filled with blood, or that she's seen all of this before in her own head, but that his cry holds likeness to his enraptured moan—which Pepper has heard on numerous occurrences, all accidental and all ending with her blushing and backing out of the room with her hand shielding her eyes. The only difference in these two sounds is the presence of agony, that his sound of pleasure is distorted and strange, as if sliced by broken glass. This is what shakes her more than anything, paralyzes her for fleeting but costly seconds at the topmost stair of the patio that leads out to the cliffside pool.

She hadn't been in control in her nightmare, but Pepper feels the adrenaline rush of danger and need—Tony's need, her own. Without a further wasted second, she locks the brakes on her wheelchair and lifts herself from it with both arms. Pepper maneuvers herself up and out and onto the ground, pulling herself along until she is down the steps and has dragged her good-for-nothing legs over to her boss.

"Tony."

Controlling her panic, Pepper seizes his helmet with shaking fingers and eases it away from his head—all of the circuitry must be totaled, she thinks, if she can take off his headgear so easily. Tony gasps when he hits the air, spitting out the expected mouthful of blood; Pepper winces as a molar bounces across the ground.

She doesn't say anything at first, too overwhelmed by her boss to form coherent phrases. Rather than attempt to speak, she heaves herself into the most comfortable sitting position that she can manage and watches as Tony takes a few deep, easing breaths. The mansion, the water below, even the clouds seem to stop to watch until, at last, he relaxes his neck and lets his forehead rest on the ground. A pregnant pause follows. A barrage of questions rises to Pepper's tongue and she has to press her lips together to stop them. And then, after traveling hundreds of miles in what is essentially broken hardware, gathers the strength to sum up his trip:

"_Fuck!_"

Pepper can hold back the inevitable outburst no longer. "Tony, what the hell happened to you?" she demands, as a mix of relief and anger rush over to take the place of fear. She'd thought that he might have become brain dead or unresponsive during his ride home. "How did you get like this? Did you finish the mission and—destroy everything?"

"Of course I did," he responds in a monotone, not lifting his head to meet her wide and frightened eyes. "Wasn't pretty, though."

"Your arm—"

"Broken, yeah. I can feel it, you know."

"But Tony—"

"Pepper, please, stop asking me things! Let me breathe for just one second…"

Pepper gives him a disapproving scowl, which he does not see with his eyes staring at the concrete half an inch from his face. She allows him his 'one second' of about a minute, surveying the rest of his suit for damage as he continues to spit stringy lines of saliva and blood at regular intervals. His red and gold suit has been dented and scraped gray by God knows what, but doesn't seem beyond repair on the outside. Tony stinks like sweat, is likely just as covered in bruises as he is in perspiration, and is apparently in enough pain to warrant not doing anything. His snappish responses mean nothing to Pepper, who is just glad to see him alive—at least, from the neck up.

"I had Jarvis call Jim and tell him to get over here as soon as he can," she says, softly.

"Good." Tony's voice sounds more like a sigh. "I need him to get me something from the garage as soon as he gets here."

"Do you want me to get it?"

"No, you won't be able to get to it from the chair."

Pepper sighs, rubbing her temples and cursing her handicap for rendering her so useless in a time like this. "Well, can't I do _something_?"

"Water… hose is fine, I don't care."

She's scrambling for the hose attached to the side of the house before he finishes his sentence, and he drinks from the steady fountain, ignoring her warnings to slow down until she has to pry the hose from his hand. Pepper bites her tongue as Tony asks her to take the armor off of his broken arm. She doesn't want to touch him, doesn't want to hurt him any more than he already hurts, but in the end must clench her teeth and follow his directions. The damage doesn't look as bad as she'd imagined—the skin is still in tact, at least—but the heavy bruising and an awkward, unnatural curve in his forearm still give her a nauseating chill.

Pepper wants to ask if she can have Happy take him to the hospital, but she already knows that he won't hear a word of it, no matter how busted up he is. Maintaining his separate identity has been tricky enough since his spill at the press conference all those months ago, and a trip to the hospital would just prompt more accusations, more press conferences, more opportunities for them to make things more complicated. Still, Pepper can't see how he intends to fix a broken arm, especially since its his dominant arm. He may be working on _her_ medical problems, but he's no doctor.

From his spot on the ground, Tony mumbles feebly to her that he's hot with all of his armor on but no functional cooling system. Pepper looks down at his motionless form and feels her throat tighten. Whether it is out of fear or relief, however, she cannot be certain.

When Rhodey arrives ten minutes later, he finds Tony and Pepper on the back porch, Tony still motionless on the ground while Pepper rinses the sweat and blood out of his hair with the garden hose. She has to more or less prod him into consciousness, for he doesn't move when she says his name and only shifts a little when she stops scratching the filth out of his hair with her sharp but gentle fingernails. Rhodey seems less perturbed by the entire ordeal than Pepper feels, though she gives herself a little credit here. He, after all, hadn't heard the metal-on-concrete sound of Tony hitting the floor. Now that she thinks about it, she's surprised that he didn't just fall right through to the basement.

Tony lifts his head only long enough to explain what he needs from the garage.

"On my desk, there's a bunch of vials in a test tube rack," he dictates, looking up from behind his drenched hair. "Get the green one, and a syringe. Those are in the top shelf in that weird kitchen cabinet on the far left of the room."

Rhodey leaves and returns about two minutes later with the needed materials, and then both he and Pepper help to roll Tony over and sit him up. Tony seems to do a little better once he's no longer lying on his face, and even goes as far as clambering to his ironclad knees to prepare the dose of—Pepper looks at the needle of the syringe and cringes—whatever that stuff is. He sticks the needle into the vial, fills the syringe with a yellow-tinted fluid, then taps out the air bubbles.

"What is that?" Rhodey asks, voicing the very question that Pepper had opened her mouth to ask not a second before.

Pepper has to reach out an arm and steady Tony as he sways a little and sits back on his knees, cradling his broken arm between his legs. He wipes dry a spot on his forearm with the thumb of the hand that holds the needle, and before anyone can stop him, presses the needle into his skin. A nauseated tingle in Pepper's stomach threatens to expel her lunch.

"It's like a user-friendly morphine dose to kill the pain until I can deal with his wounds at an easier pace," he says casually, as if he hasn't just stuck himself like a druggie. He shoots Rhodey a quick glance. "Until _you_ can deal with my wounds, that is. I'm going to need you to reset the bone."

"Are you serious, Tony? I'm not a doctor!"

"Sure you are, anyone can be a doctor. Help me up—"

Rhodey steps forward to help Tony to his feet, protesting all the while. He keeps trying to reason with his injured friend as he leads him away from Pepper, up the flight of stairs, and into the mansion without telling Pepper what she should do now. She listens until his objections and Tony's reassurances fade away, and only once she is alone does she bury her face in her hands and ask aloud to nobody in particular, "Why do I do this to myself?"

ooo

The evening progresses just as Pepper has planned. The only difference in execution is that when six o'clock rolls around, Tony is sitting at the head of his home conference table with his arm in a splint and sling. The conference call goes over well besides this one ailment (and several others that nobody can see under the Armani), with Tony and the Chinese branch manager speaking fluently in Mandarin while Pepper reads a live translation by Jarvis. Once the men have cordially parted ways, having established the ETA for the Freedom project, Tony slouches down in his seat and announces that he needs to get some sleep. Pepper, who has spent the last few hours panicking and tending to his various maladies, concurs with his statement, despite that it is only eight PM and they both have things to do. She's ahead of schedule anyway, and Tony has done more than expected.

Briefly, while she and Tony are finishing off bowls of EasyMac, Pepper remembers Tony's excitement from earlier in the morning.

_The booster._

She looks up from her dish to ask about it, has already opened her mouth to jest about when she should pencil in an appointment with him, but it only takes one look for her to close her mouth. She sees as Tony stares down into his dinner with his eyes half-lidded, idly poking at the food with his fork in an unenthusiastic effort to separate the elbow macaroni from the thick cheese in the bowl. There's a decent-sized bruise blossoming across his non-broken forearm now, and the thick layer of cover up she'd applied to his face before the conference doesn't altogether mask the circles beneath his eyes.

This is a man exhausted, not a scientist prepared to carry out a potentially life-changing experiment. Expressionless, Pepper stores away her hope for now. She allows Tony to sit at the table until he nearly passes out into his mac and cheese, at which point she shepherds him up the stairs and into bed.

He's asleep before she can pull the covers up about his waist.

ooo

It's not until three days later that either of them speaks about the booster shot. Pepper has become silently obsessed with the topic, all the while doing more work than necessary to distract herself from the idea. When Tony wants to bring it up again, she reasons, he'll bring it up. Maybe he's found something wrong with it and had to go back to work—or maybe he's just been too busy trying to figure out how to change parts in his cars with one arm in a sling. Either way, it's probably best to let him deal with it on his own time. After all the time he's spent working on this project, it's unlikely that he's forgotten about it. She remembers every time she faces a flight of stairs. Tony, knowing him, remembers every time he looks in her direction. He probably thinks of the moment where she hit the ground, or perhaps the parts that occurred later on. The memory is a bit hazy for Pepper, though she _does_ remember, quite clearly, shouting at him for being so selfish—right after he'd saved her from being crushed by a bus.

The irony. Pepper shakes her head as she sets the last of the morning's dishes down and closes the dishwasher. Tony had told her not to bother with doing the dishes ("That's what I pay the maid for, Potts.), but she doesn't like to see someone else taking care of her mess, as minute as it is. Things have become so domestic between Pepper and Tony that she figures she might as well get over the prospect of doing domestic things with him.

"Pepper, where are you—?"

Tony appears in the kitchen only a moment after his voice, peering around the corner as if trying to sneak up on her. When he sees her sitting by the counter with a dishtowel in her hand, his look of concern morphs into a lopsided grin. The sling around his neck still catches her off guard, even days after his run-in with a particularly bad fight (and the concrete patio). Pepper also notes, and remains as blank-faced as she can manage, that the all-too-familiar lock of hair has settled back over his eyebrow. She feels her cheeks grow pink despite her best efforts to maintain a semblance of neutrality. Tony, she's grateful to think, doesn't notice.

"I come bearing news," he says, crossing through the doorway.

"Oh?" responds his nonplussed PA. "What kind of news?"

"The good kind."

Tony strides forward, grabbing a high-backed chair from the kitchen table and depositing it beside her wheelchair before he drops his weight onto it. He leans his good elbow casually on the armrest of her chair so that their faces are close enough to justify Pepper's shifting away to the opposite side of her seat. Surprised at the sudden motion, Pepper has to first respond by grabbing the wheels of her chair so that she doesn't go gliding backwards across the floor.

"Can I help you, Mr. Stark?" Pepper appraises him with the same cool expression that he's currently using on her, though there's a certain lack of quirked smile on her lips.

Unfazed, Tony's gaze meanders from Pepper's mouth to her eyes as he props his chin on his hand. "The booster treatment works, Pepper. I just called Rhodey and told him to get his butt over here within the next ten minutes."

All taken-aback feelings vanish at his words, and Pepper finds herself staring at the face hovering inches from hers with her mouth agape and no response suitable enough to voice.

She blinks. "How do you know?"

"Because I can move my arm."

"You can move your…but you said that stuff was morphine!"

He gives her the 'whoops, I guess I lied to you but it's too late to apologize for it' look. "Details, Potts."

Tony shrugs out of the sling and holds his arms out in front of him, parallel to each other and to the ground so that she can see the distinct lack of swelling. Then, as if to prove to her that he's not lying—as if he would, in all of this mess, even _try_ to lie to her about it, or even _could_ if he wanted to—he flexes both arms. Granted, the injured arm is stiffer and can flex less than the unharmed one, and the healing bruise still plagues his forearm like an ugly yellow tattoo, but there it is. He should have been in a cast for weeks more, not gingerly moving the arm around.

"There's a little pain still, but it's healing so fast that I expect to be slingless by tomorrow," he informs her, slipping back into the sling with a tiny grunt of discomfort.

They share another moment of silence, in which Pepper contemplates giving Tony an earful about testing the treatment on himself but realizes not a moment later that it would be for nothing. She can already hear his many justifications pinging through her head, the least of which being 'Like I'd test it out on you first? I've already hurt you once.' Oh, Tony. Always reckless, unflinchingly loyal, exasperatingly bold.

And speaking of bold…

She meets his eyes again, while he stuffs his uncooperative arm into the sling once more, and this time successfully fights back the blush. Tony, catching the effort behind her look even if he doesn't understand its root, again props his elbow on the chair's armrest and leans his cheek against his fist. When he exhales, she feels his warm breath on her upper arm and has to twist the dishtowel in her hands to stop herself from reacting in a most unprofessional manner.

_Where did that line go, anyway?_

Pepper can't help but wonder at what point she stopped being so adamant about it. Mere months ago, she would have been infuriated at the prospect of Tony invading her personal space, would have agonized and fumed over the prospect of his even _trying_ to be in the same room as her when she's donned in nothing but a bathrobe, as she had been the first time he announced the news on his treatment. And Tony would never have considered barging in on her like that, not months ago.

'_We've become domesticated'_, Pepper reflects. Whether or not they want to be is another question altogether, but it's happened without their consent or awareness.

"A little space, Tony?" she requests, raising her eyebrows.

With a small chuckle, Tony looks to the towel clamped between her hands, then reaches down and gently pries it from her fingers and tosses it aside, out of her line of sight.

"Only if you promise me a triumphant kiss for when you cross the finish line of your first marathon, Potts."

Trapped, and in an attempt to seize some impression of control, Pepper offers no promise but instead throws the chair suddenly in reverse. Tony leaps to his feet as she directs the back wheel of her chair over his toes, and almost topples over in an attempt to remain upright while hopping gingerly from foot to foot and swearing fluently between gasps of pain and surprised laughter.

ooo

Before she can process the extent of what is happening, Rhodey arrives and Pepper finds herself in the garage, where Tony has already set up shop for the procedure. The process goes by quickly, though it involves a few annoyingly slow moments in which Tony lifts up the back of her blouse just enough to mark the spot where Rhodey will administer the shot. Rhodey's vague protests against being the shot-giver don't do much to boost Pepper's confidence, nor does Tony's response that they can't use a real doctor because this procedure is unregulated and therefore illegal.

But when the time comes, when she's leaning sideways against the workbench with Tony beside her and Rhodey dabbing at the injection sight with an alcohol swab, she experiences a sizeable surge of gratitude beneath the overlying fear. Because this is it, this is the supposed moment where everything changes for the better. Pepper's dreams are regularly visited by visions of herself, strutting about in four-inch heels and a pencil skirt without assistance from any devices. The image has never seemed so attainable as it does right now. This is it.

Tony takes her hand. Pepper sets her jaw for the pain and twists her hand so that his fingers are squeezable in his palm. The gesture, as it turns out, is unnecessary, for she doesn't feel anything more than a bit of pressure as Rhodey eases the needle between two vertebrae at the base of her spine, right at the spot where she loses feeling. The whole procedure is over before she has the chance to get nervous about the needle.

"That's it," says Rhodey, glancing at Tony over Pepper's turned shoulder.

"Then that's it." Tony looks to Pepper and smiles softly, running a thumb over her knuckles in such an affectionate manner that Pepper is all too taken aback and emotionally conflicted to stop him, just as she had been in the kitchen, just as she had been after her shower.

Rhodey smoothes a Band-Aid over the injection site and shoots Tony another look, pointedly ignoring the silent conversation that bounces back and forth between boss and PA. "Don't break your dominant arm next time, Stark. You know how I hate needles."

"That's really comforting, Jim. I appreciate your self-confidence," says Pepper in even tones.

"And there won't be a next time, Rhodey, but thanks for believing in me. It's really reassuring. As for you, Potts—" Tony cocks his eyebrow at her. "I expect you might notice some differences soon. In the next day or so, I would bet."

"Thank you, Tony. Jim." Pepper cranes her neck backwards to meet his eye and mouth the words 'thank you', a gesture which he counters with a small nod as he tosses the empty syringe into an orange biohazard bin under the workbench.

She turns slowly to where Tony sits with one elbow propped on the workbench and fixes him with an uncertain, tight-lipped stare.

"Things are starting to come together," she intones quietly. "We'll be back to the normal ways of doing things soon, I expect."

A cloud seems to move over his bright features, darkening them into a straight expression. "Yeah."

He rises from his chair with the announcement that he needs to tinker with the suit some more before he heads off for work, letting Pepper's hand slip from his. Her heart tugs at her conscience with the feel of his rough but gentle grip leaving her behind. Rhodey picks her up and sets her back in her wheelchair, and together they move into the elevator. More than anything, Tony's announcement means that he wants to be alone.

Once the silver door has slid across the frame and locked into place, Rhodey looks down at Pepper with his arms folded skeptically across his chest. "You two have some serious issues, you know that?"

Pepper shakes her head and flicks a stray curl away from her face with as much dignity as she can muster.

"Please stop, Jim."

"I'm just saying."

"Well, I would like you to not say it."

"Suit yourself."

Rhodey shakes his head. Pepper tries to remember what exactly the "normal ways of doing things" felt like, but to no avail. Perhaps it's just a lost cause.

ooo

oo

* * *

A/n: I now have T-minus three days to finish and post my TonyPepper Holiday fic. Let's hope I don't stay up all night and sleep in too late!

Also, if you're interested in such things, I made a twitter for lulz and for following people who I find interesting. My username on there is Invaderk.

Thanks so much for reading!


	8. Deliberation

__A/n: That awkward moment when it's been three years since my last update. A lot has happened in the last three years! I should probably apologize, but I'm afraid that nobody who was around to read this fic in 2009 is even going to see this... last night I saw The Avengers movie, and was so overwhelmed by my love for Tony and Pepper that I decided to dig this out of the bin and finish it.

There's a couple people I ought to thank. Most importantly, cardxiv, who has been my patient beta for all these years! You are wonderful. Thanks to those who have read and reviewed throughout this process, including all the people who sent messages in the three-year gap between my last update and now. A special thanks to one reviewer, TheyCallMeSquinty, who left a review so unnerving that it has sat at the bottom of my inbox since I received it in 2010, in hope that every time I clear my email I'll see it and have the motivation to finish this fic.

This story can probably use some serious edits. In hindsight I can see how it is potentially problematic, but I gave it a scan and decided it passes for now. In five years, I might just go back and edit it... but for now, I'm content to be done. So to past readers re-discovering: I am sorry! Please feel free to re-read this (I had to in order to figure out what was happening. How sad is that?). To new readers: welcome! Thanks for stopping by.

Disclaimer: I own nothing and make no profit.

Happy Reading!

* * *

_VIII. Deliberation_

Pepper fully expects several things to happen now that she's received Tony's perfected treatment, and she expects them in a specific order. First, she figures it will take a few days for the booster to begin to show its progress on her damaged nerves, until which point she will have to endure a series of uncomfortable side-effects. Headaches are among the least concern here. Nausea sits a bit higher on the list. She expects that she'll have to spend some quality time with the tile floor of her bathroom, sending out emails with her Blackberry between bouts of leaning over the toilet with her hair pinned back from her face. When the booster finally starts to work, Pepper figures that she'll wake up with what Tony describes as a "numb throbbing" in her legs and shriek and cry until her voice escapes her and she can do nothing but smile. Potential side-effects are small prices to pay for being able to strut the distance from her car to her office at S.I.

The day after Rhodey delivers the shot, the three of them go out for a celebratory dinner at her favorite seafood place. It's located just around the corner from her old apartment, and she finds herself pressing her nose against the window glass to stare at it as they pass. At dinner, it's just them at the table in the far back corner of the restaurant, blocked from prying eyes by the junction of the wall. Everyone seems to be in good spirits, but Pepper can sense a hefty hesitation seated between she and Tony, a gap that spans wider than the table between them. Rhodey pretends not to notice, wrestling with his lobster tail while Tony sips his bourbon and Pepper pokes at her fish and chips with little appetite. She's grateful for their mutual agreement to ignore the issue, even if it keeps growing bigger with every shared glance. At some point, it's bound to explode all at once and coat them in a thick layer of awkward.

Pepper finds it surprisingly difficult to be excited for her imminent recovery when faced with the prospects of confronting her boss about moving out, dealing with ungodly amounts of PR work, and dodging her feelings every time they creep into the technicalities of the process. Today she sits back in the booth and tries to feel good about her future, because as vague as the details remain at this point, she can at least look forward to waking up with feeling in her feet.

The actual events that occur don't match up to her (_drug-induced?_ She wonders lamely with hindsight) expectations. Pepper doesn't get ill and spend hours sleeping and losing her lunch. Nor does she experience any sort of "numb throb" tingle or whatever it was supposed to be, or any sort of unusual sensation.

Quite the opposite, Pepper feels nothing at all.

She endures no change, Rhodey's cheerful morning calls to check on her progress become more hesitant with each passing day, and by the one week mark Tony seems to have lost any faith in his concoction. He goes on a drinking binge that lasts three days and ends only when Pepper wheels herself down to the garage, somehow heaves her unconscious boss onto the garage creeper, and rolls him into the shower that sits in the corner of the room.

"I'm just as disappointed as you are, Tony, but you don't see me drinking myself into an oblivion," she snaps from just outside the shower, frowning down at him as he splutters and emerges from a booze-induced nap. "Get a hold of yourself."

Tony rolls over to face her, blinking water out of his eyes. Pepper yanks aside the blue vinyl curtain and shuts down the stream of cold water.

"Are you going to drown if I leave you down here on your own, or can I leave?" she says, not bothering to conceal the venom in her voice.

Wordlessly, Tony shakes his head and waves her away with one hand. She sighs and makes for the elevator with the announcement that she's having Happy take her to her main office, and that she'll have dinner delivered. Tony gives her the benefit of disappearing into the elevator before he wipes at his face with an equally wet hand and lets loose a compilation of curses that would have made her pale skin flush. He'd slept off the majority of the last few drinks, but nevertheless wakes up with his mind abuzz and achey, his chest as lead-filled as it had been before.

He can see her harsh words printed in text across the inside of his forehead. He feels it as much as he sees it, like a pressure above the eyes. Yes, he's disappointed. Never in any point in his life has he reacted well to failure. He'd been raised watching the highly-publicized accomplishments of his father and never-wavering support of his mother. If Howard Stark failed, Tony never got to hear about it. Those sorts of things were kept behind closed doors and within liquor cabinets out of his reach until much later, and by the time he was old enough to talk to his father about dealing with failure, it was too late for the both of them. Tony had been so sure this time, sure enough so that he could actually feel his impending separation from Pepper Potts growing ever-closer. Knowing that he's failed her stings enough on its own.

He probably could have dealt with it in a more mature manner, had he not also felt another, more disturbing emotion.

Relief. That he should hold onto Pepper for just a little longer, because her recovery will certainly forge that closing gap between them. If she slips on a pair of black four-inch heels and _click-click-clacks_ her way out the door, she'll return only as an employee with limits and no excuse to act as anything else but just that. Tony can very well say goodbye to late-night movies and informal dinners at his kitchen table, to idle conversation about nothing more important than who's going to win this season of _Dancing with the Stars_. In these last few months, he's learned about her education beyond her diploma and résumé , about the time she spilled a glass of milk all over her first date in high school, that she played Clara in _The Nutcracker_ when she was little. These insignificant divulgences will go to nothing but an appreciative smile on her part. Pepper, in her unswaying professionalism, would thank him for nursing her back to health, produce her Blackberry as if from thin air, and ask "Will that be all, Mr. Stark?" as she dials up the head of finance and starts to back out the door.

But no, that will not "be all, Ms. Potts" and Tony understands this more now than ever before in his sort of buzzed clarity. And in an unforeseen rush of self-loathing and guilt, he'd hit the bottle and only come back when—wait, how many days has it been?

Tony climbs out of the gym-style shower and glances at the atomic clock mounted on the far wall.

Good God, it's been three days. He would have flipped a shit too, had he been in her place. Rubbing his temples, he shuffles over to the desk and yanks open the left-hand drawer in search of a child-safe bottle. If he's going to "get a hold of" himself, as Pepper had so delicately put it, then he's going to need a boost from his good friend ibuprofen.

ooo

After dragging himself upstairs for a real shower and dressing himself in whatever he pulls out of the closet first (that's not much of a risk, really, considering the countless pairs of jeans he keeps around. It's when ties become a factor that he gets a little dizzy), Tony meanders down to the kitchen and discovers a pot of coffee and a box of breakfast pastries on the counter. He opens the box. Inside, a half dozen cheese danishes wait alongside a few of those flavored creamers that he loves from the coffee shop the next town over. He'd mentioned to Pepper once or twice that he's going to buy out their supplies one day. Since then, the individually packaged Irish Creams have periodically appeared in his refrigerator.

This is the kind of stuff that kills him. Their relationship has split into two disconnected pieces; first she launches a personal attack on him, then converts over and makes sure he's ready for work—complete with frosted pastries and delicious coffee, which he takes some time to enjoy with a few tablets of ibuprofen. He tries not to dwell too much on this dichotomy, though. It certainly won't help him get rid of his headache.

Given Pepper's current state of scarcely-concealed dejection, it would probably be best if he actually does some work for a change. A Pepper less stressed with work is bound to be a Pepper less likely to buy a gun and shoot him for the first derogatory comment he makes.

Leaning up against the countertop with the last few bites of a cheese danish in his hand, Tony digs his cell phone out of his pocket and hits Pepper's number on the speed dial. It rings only twice before a shuffling sound reaches his ears, followed by a smooth-but-pointed, "Welcome back to planet Earth, Mr. Stark. How was your trip?"

He can tell right away that she's trying to make light of her snarky mood this morning, and he can't say that he blames her.

"Would have been more enjoyable if you'd taken it with me, if you know what I mean."

Whoops. So much for not making comments until _after_ he's earned the right—a task possible only via stacks of paperwork and helping his idiot engineers figure out how to get the coil in the neuroreactor to stay the hell still. Ah well, he's still not completely sober yet. He can't help it if his tongue is a little loose.

Pepper ignores his remark, leaping into a full explanation of his schedule and only pausing to breathe once she's reached the bottom of the list (which Tony pictures to be about six feet long).

"… and at _that_ point you've covered enough for one day, so you should be free to do whatever you want after six as long as the conference goes as planned. I was thinking chicken parm for dinner; I really like that little place just off the turnpike, so I'll probably order it from there and have Happy swing me by after I get out. Did you get all that?"

"Uhm—" Tony pulls his head out from inside the cabinet, where he has been digging for a pen during her entire spiel. "Chicken parm, got it."

She gives a light sigh, just a mark of pseudo-exasperation to let him know that while his inattention isn't a surprise, he's still a pain in the ass. "Jarvis, did you get all that?"

"Printing a transcript to your office printer now, Miss Potts," comes the reply in Tony's ear, as if the AI were sitting in on the conversation.

"Thank you. And Tony—"

"Yes ma'am."

Pepper sighs again, and this time it's a _real_ sigh, the kind that makes him actually set down his pastry and pay attention.

"Listen, I want to apologize for this morning. I was out of line," she says, in a tone somewhere between professionalism and the intimate voice with which she worries about his health, or the weather.

Surprised, Tony dismisses her apology with a wave of his hand and a reassurance that "It's nothing, Potts."

"No, it's not _nothing_, Tony," she insists. He hears the sound of her pen clicking repeatedly in the background of their conversation—it's a little anxious habit that she's substituted for pacing over the last few months. "I know I've been living at your house, but how you choose to spend your free time is really none of my business as long as it doesn't interfere with work. I should never have… _reacted_, like I did. It was inappropriate."

He has to wonder, even as she speaks, how much it probably pains her to apologize when she was clearly in the right. Personally, Tony feels more confliction about the business/personal flip-flopping that's occurring as they speak. It's really starting to make his brain spin.

"I don't think it was inappropriate at all. Quite the contrary, I think it was very appropriate because I was being inappropriate and you showed me who's boss, so—"

"Except for the part where I'm not your boss."

"Uh, yes and no. Much as I hate to admit it, I'm about ninety-eight percent sure that you wear the pants in this relationship."

"_Tony_."

Okay, okay, so maybe now isn't really the time to start delving into the relationship waters. He wasn't looking to have this conversation anyway—at least not until he's sure that he's sober enough to say the right thing. And even if he has trouble meeting her eye, he submits to the fact that this is a conversation they should have face-to-face.

"But really, Potts, all jokes aside, how did you manage to get me all the way from the couch to the shower?"

"You were on the floor, for starters."

Her swift response is enough to start burning through the fog of tension that hangs between them. Tony actually gives a snort of laughter as he wipes the pastry crumbs off on his clean jeans.

"Oh. Well, I'm still amazed. You must have some serious muscles."

"It was more like the adrenaline of fury," she quips back.

"Would it help if I gave you a raise?" Tony asks, so glad that they're heading in a more comfortable direction that he helps himself to a celebratory third danish.

This suggestion actually prompts a small chuckle from her end of the phone line. The thought of Pepper smiling goes a long way toward curing his headache, for the gesture has become a sort of anomaly over the past week. He feels a bit as if he's won an award for good behavior, even though his actions have been anything but.

"Maybe if I wasn't already getting paid enough to feed a family of six," she says.

There are a few choice comments that he could make here (namely that they should get started on that "family of six" now and work out the details later), but Tony in even the most devious of moods knows when to let it go. He'll do better in the long run if he lets this conversation end on a good note. So he ends their banter (for now) with the promise that he'll take a look at the schedule and get everything done by six, and when he hangs up, he feels distinctly more optimistic about the world in general. Pepper's warning tone, rather than disheartening him, had acted as an acknowledgement that there is, in fact, a relationship here.

As if she could have ignored it. Tony's always known, of course. The difficult part is just trying to figure out how to sway it to his preferred side without invoking anybody's wrath.

ooo

One week turns into two. The blisters on Pepper's hands have long since faded from months and months of wheelchair rolling, in the same way that her hope has begun to fade. She does her best to maintain a semblance of calm, conducting meetings with the confident air that makes even the most feared businessmen shrink back in their seats. She gets all of her work done precisely on time. Her hair is flawless whether she curls it or straightens it or sweeps it up into a ponytail. The only indication of her malcontent is the tiny little sigh that she can't keep from escaping when she can't see over the heads of a hundred reporters during a press conference, or right before she turns out the lights to go to sleep. She's pressed like a power suit, crisp and clean. She needs no words.

Then, one morning, Pepper sleeps through her alarm for the first time since college. She wakes up with the sun already beaming in through her window, the soft sounds of "smooth jazz radio" playing throughout the room. At first she feels so comfortable, the down comforter wrapped tight and warm about her shoulders, that she doesn't realize that this particular radio program doesn't begin until noon. And then—

"Holy _shit._"

The bed sheets fall down around her waist as she hoists herself upright in bed. That sinking sense of panic begins the moment she catches sight of the "1:00 p.m." on her analog clock, and doesn't relent as her mind goes into executive overdrive. She immediately delves into her mental schedule, so engrossed in what she's already missed today that she almost misses something drastically more important.

When she leans across to grab her Blackberry and glasses from the bedside table, the fabric of her rumpled sheets pulls taught against her bare foot. Pepper freezes with her arm extended, eyes widening under her tangle of red hair. She felt that. She _felt_ that.

A rush of disbelief comes next, and for a second she seems to be back in her hospital bed again. It's as if she's opened her eyes for the first time and felt that horrible sense of distance that there was months ago. This time she's had to live everything through, every challenge growing more mentally—and physically—complex with time. Somehow, though, it's almost as if she's awakened from that very same coma. Every moment with Tony is a dream, every instance of wheelchair-bound helplessness simply a fading memory. All she needs is one fleeting twinge.

Pepper doesn't care that she discovers the lump forming in her throat when she asks Jarvis to connect her with Tony, nor when the AI responds that the genius in question has evidently fallen asleep beneath one of his cars. She calls his name over the intercom until she hears his snores snap abruptly to a finish, and then beckons him to her room.

Tony must have heard the waver in her voice, because he's never appeared faster—not even that time after the 2003 Stark Expo when six swimsuit models wrote his name in chocolate sauce across their anorexic-thin tummies and climbed into the back of his limousine.

"Pepper, what's going on? You're still in _bed_—?"

She turns at the sound of his voice to find him standing in the doorway, chest heaving from his sprint up the stairs and across the mansion. One look at his oil-smeared jeans and mussed hair tells her that he's sacrificed his sleep to work on the Iron Man or one of his many cars. Normally she would have wondered how he could have gone until one in the afternoon without noticing her absence, but she isn't thinking on her normal path this afternoon. Her mind is quickly filling up with a collage of images, from strapping on a pair of heels to finally taking a place at the start of a road race, from swimming in the Caribbean to _walking_ to her car.

In a rush of doubt, she snatches her glasses up from the table, jams them over her nose, and yanks the covers away, just as she'd done back in the hospital. She breathes a short sigh at the sight of motionless legs, as she'd done then.

"I felt something," she says. "It was like a—a twinge, or… I'm not sure how to explain it."

"Where?"

"My foot."

Tony pauses for just a moment in the doorway before striding over to her bedside and sitting down by her feet. "It didn't feel like the numb tingle I told you about?"

"Not really…"

He's already pushing the hem of her pink pajama pants up her ankle so that he can better inspect the foot in question. "You're sure you felt something?"

"Yes. I think," Pepper answers, but she's already beginning to doubt her revelation. She hadn't felt a thing when Tony lifted her ankle. She frowns. "Maybe I imagined it, I don't know."

Shaking his head, Tony gently sets her foot back down and smoothes a hand over it as an afterthought, like he's just finished giving her a massage.

"I don't think so… I've never seen you sleep in this late, not ever. It would take more than a little exhaustion to keep you from missing a corporate meeting, Potts."

Now he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small screw—probably a spare from the car he was sleeping under when she called upon him. Then, before she has a chance to ask what he's doing, he's grabbed Pepper's ankle again and delivered one quick poke to her big toe. In turn, Pepper jumps for what may very well be like the tenth time this morning as a sharp pang shoots up her entire foot; the jolt runs deep, not felt on the skin's surface but far below. She gives a shriek that conveys more surprise than pain.

"Ouch!" Pepper says it once, realizes that she's said it, and is then nearly overcome. She can't say for certain the composition of the wave that hits her—confusion and surprise and sheer, unrefined joy—but she can't take it all at once, and it plows her over. "That _hurt._ Oh my God."

Months and months of pressured waiting has reached its boiling point, and it hits her with that one tiny gesture. First comes the stifled gasp, and then that first sob rises up from her stomach. She presses her hand to her mouth to control the sound, but doesn't even try to stop the front from coming because it's what she needs. From off to the side, she hears Tony swear under his breath, then she nearly falls to the side as the mattress creaks under his shifted weight. She covers her bleary eyes with both hands and holds them there as they start to run.

"Geez, Potts, I didn't think I poked you that hard," he says, borderline earnest in her ear, draping an arm around her shaking shoulders. She presses her cheek into the crook of his shoulder and weeps to the scent of axle grease and coffee stains.

Pepper has a tangle of conflicting feelings, a hundred questions, and too many errands that she can't take care of because she can't get a grip. She thinks of swinging her legs off the bed and standing for the first time, and not falling back because she, for once, has the control that she constantly aspires to attain. She has all of this and more, so much that she cannot even begin to fathom that they have finally reached the beginning, and the end. It's the most wonderful thought she's ever had, and, coupled with Tony's solid weight supporting her from the side, she lets it wash over. But she has no words.

ooo

The surgeons and doctors are calling her sudden recovery a "miracle", which is a thought not too pleasing because it implies perceived hopelessness. Three days after she meets with Dr. Morgan Stanley to wiggle her toes, a headline appears in the paper with her name blazed across it: "_VIRGINIA POTTS HEALED—EXPERTS QUESTION STARK INVOLVEMENT._" She herself isn't bothered too much on her own behalf, but Tony's situation makes her a little nervous. Of course, just about everyone is looking for Tony to step up and take the credit—her staying at his home has been odd enough, with the only alternative explanation being a relationship (rumors soundly quashed by PR). It's in Tony's nature to slap his name on just about any invention he crafts and, in truth, Pepper is somewhat surprised that he's exercised so much self-restraint to this point. She's been thanking him up and down since the morning the medicine took effect, telling him that she'd be willing to deal with the mess if he wanted to make a public statement, but he brushes off every attempt at gratitude.

"It's not about me, Pepper," he reminds her as he steers seamlessly through Malibu traffic in the Audi. "I got you into this, and I promised to get you out. That's all there is to it, so drop the credit thing."

He's right, but still. Pepper can't help but feel a surge of pride in her wayward boss every time he shirks a new accusation of medical experimenting, especially when they call him a hero. Tony really loves when they do that.

Pepper's schedule becomes ridden with personal appointments—something she would have frowned upon before the incident, and absolutely forbidden from any new employees under her tight-fisted supervision. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons are dedicated to physical therapy. Tuesday and Thursday, she lifts weights in the mansion's gym to keep the rest of her body from weakening in the process. She's yet to take her first steps, but with every session comes just a little more strength. The long since depleted muscles in her legs protest and ache in the first few weeks, to the point where she needs to keep a bottle of ibuprofen on her person at all times.

Tony, with nothing better to do, joins her on most of these excursions. As soon as work gets out, Tony cranks the pump-up jams and they hit the gym for an hour or so. She tries to stick to the basics of therapy—which basically mandates that she lay on the ground and try to hold her legs off the floor for ten seconds at a time—but as time presses onward, she slowly begins to add lifting to the list of exercises. Tony, as he's bench pressing ungodly amounts, will look over to where Pepper is struggling with an 8-pound free weight, and he'll laugh. It's all she can do to keep from laughing right along with him. The pair of them, training together as if they've been doing it for twenty years.

Unfortunately, her joy only stretches as far as her limbs permit. There is the dark underside to all of this, that which has occurred to her on and off since those very first days of recovery. Being here has made her content to stay, but every bit of her logical mind knows that the repercussions will outweigh the benefits. There's Big Business to consider. It's the most demanding of all her life's pressures, and disregarding the game's rules could drop Stark Industries into its biggest scandal yet—the quid pro quo functions of "Tony Stark's Sexy Affair Life", as she once heard it. It could cost a fortune, literally millions of dollars.

They both know this, but never seem to find issue when they're sweating it out in the basement, straining their tired bodies in hope of making them stronger. Pepper wishes her willpower was stronger, too. Wishing doesn't keep her mouth shut when Tony offers to help her stretch out after a home physical therapy session.

"Sure," she instead says, before she can bite her tongue. "Thank you."

She raises her foot as high as it will go (a few inches, but it's miles from where she started) and he bends to hitch a hand under her ankle.

"Tell me when it starts to hurt," he says.

Pepper feels like shit. Guilt underlies every false pretense. Really, she doesn't mean to be so self-flagellating. She's experienced enough trouble in her time to know that wallowing in quiet frustration is only going to cause more burns when the inevitable explosion occurs. Pepper cannot help but allow her worries to dissolve, if just for the few moments where emotion overrides reason. Pepper knows that she has to get a grip, sooner rather than later. And yet, she lets Tony squat down to her level and rise up, slowly, with her leg.

The muscles react as they should. They strain under the pressure, sore and all but tearing from the stretch. In a way, Pepper likes the hurt. Every little reminder, every old newfound sensation, it helps. She flops back against the yoga mat and laces her fingers behind her head.

Pepper feels Tony's fingers slip from the heel of her sneaker to the bare skin of her Achilles tendon, where her stretchy pants have fallen back toward her knee. She opens her eyes for just a moment, and standing above her is Tony as she has never seen him. His eyes roam elsewhere across the room, deliberately avoiding her gaze and soft curve of her leg. Save for his pursed lips, his expression is as bored as she's ever seen it. Here is his warm touch on her skin, as casual as if her were brushing her arm in passing. And yet, Pepper panics.

"I think—" she winces as he hits the point where stretching meets genuine pain. His eyes meet hers. He holds the pose just a moment longer, then relents. "Okay, that's good."

As Tony begins to lower her leg to rest, he slips both hands around her ankle. When her foot hits the ground, she half expects him to move along as if dismissed. But no such luck.

"One down, one to go!" he says, already moving for her other leg. "How'd that feel?"

She tears her gaze from his earnest expression, giving her stretched leg a little shake before she offers up the other.

"Good," she says, because it is the truth. "It was good."

Guilty.

ooo

Tony is beginning to lose whatever little control he has. He keeps an eye on Pepper as she tackles press conferences and gossipy tabloid authors who would love nothing more than to watch her fall from her clean record. She's all smiles and composure—and so, so grateful. And it bugs the shit out of him because he knows, and he knows she knows, and the more they ignore it the more he wants to fill his tub with liquor and take a bath.

He doesn't. He scowls silently over his club soda with lime at work and social parties, but doesn't take one sip of his favorite scapegoat. As long as he keeps the backs of his fingers against her shoulder at these gatherings, he doesn't need to drink—and when she laughs, he feels this hum travel all the way up to his chest. If he can't spot her wheelchair in the crowd, he begins to panic. He wants to drink. Oh God, he wants to take their mutual ignorance and pour it down the drain. Tony is smart, though, and knows her well enough to believe that there must be a way. If he takes just one look at her, he can feel himself moving everywhere all at once, yet never moving at all.

The day that he, for the first time in his life, stretches a woman's legs up over his shoulder in a completely non-sexual manner, he wanders into Pepper's bedroom while she's not around. He's not even sure how he wound up there—he'd been pacing around in the garage, twisting a screwdriver into the palm of his hand as if it would help collect his thoughts—and suddenly, he was up the stairs and standing in the doorway. He pokes around her bathroom, peeks behind the shower curtain, sticks his nose in her shampoo just to make sure he hadn't imagined it.

Fuck, the whole house smells like her. His clothes carry the scent of her fancy-ass laundry detergent. When he comes home from a day of bullshit shenanigans, he loosens his tie, yanks it over his head, and tosses it onto the kitchen table that she set for dinner before she left. There's a vase of fresh daisies on the counter, a grocery list written in floral stationary and tacked up on the fridge. Overwhelmed, Tony can do little but collapse onto the couch and run his hands over his face, through his hair.

When did they become so _domestic?_ At what point did they cross the boundary of host and guest. When did she slip from PA to roommate? She's all over the house, in every refined detail.

Tony hates it because it's corny, because the daisies look so out of place on his stainless steel dishwasher. He hates it most, though, because he also kind of likes it. And even if the details linger on, their creator will have gone. Unless he comes up with something.

The front door opens. Pepper comes rolling through the entryway, her purse balanced on her knees as always. She's still in the chair, but not for much longer. She can lift her legs straight up if she concentrates hard enough, with little weights strapped to her ankles. He speculates that she'll be taking her first steps within a few days.

"Tony?"

She turns the sharp corner into the living room with well-practiced ease. He doesn't have to look to know her exact reaction to finding him on the couch with his hand cradling his head. He knows that her eyebrows are knitting together, that her head is tilting to the left, just a touch.

"Tony, are you all right?"

"Headache," he answers, somewhat truthfully because his whole _body_ aches.

Off to the side, he hears her start for the bathroom, where the medicine cabinet awaits.

"Let me get you some ibuprofen, or an Advil. You prefer ibuprofen, right? I forget which—and what do you want for dinner? You have to be on the phone with New York in an hour so you'd better eat now."

What he _wants_ is a drink, but he's trying to be a good boy and so he answers, "Salvation."

An appreciative chuckle comes next, echoing off the bathroom walls.

"Unless they serve that at Taco Bell, I'm not sure I can swing it. How about chef salads from Renaldo's?" Pepper answers.

Tony shakes his head, rolling his eyes up at the ceiling and shaking his head as if to ask what he's done to deserve such torture. This woman. This _woman_.

When he speaks, he's amazed that he can keep his voice level. "Salad's fine. I'll eat anything with a little buffalo sauce, even a salad."

He's running out of time. Tony thinks back to his conversation with Reed, to the advice of the married men who have paraded through his life during his journey to a medical miracle.

He thinks of Pepper's mother—what had she called him? A _murderer_. He thinks of Pepper, asleep in her chair after his return from overseas, and her solid weight in his arms as he carried her to her room. Her robe, fastened tightly at the waist over her pajamas. He thinks of the pair of them together on the couch, writing up her recovery list. Pepper with a notepad balanced on one knee, teaching him his social security number and a trick to memorization. He hears her words as clear as when she'd said them, stinging in his ears even though time has filled in the gaps:

_Soon you'll be so self-sufficient you won't even need me anymore._

And then he knows.

ooo

His prediction turns out to be true. He's programming some upgrades into the Iron Man when Pepper's voice rings, breathless, over the intercom.

"Tony, are you there?"

Her tone makes him spin around in his chair, as if he expected his eyes to fall upon her. He calls aloud to the room, head tilted back toward the staircase. "Pepper?"

"Tony!" her voice sounds again through the system. "Tony, I did it—I just—I was feeling anxious all morning, so I decided to try standing. And it worked!"

"You did it without me?" he says, aghast. "What if you'd—?"

"Just come up here and help me."

His jaw hangs down somewhere around his chest. He's already leapt to his feet in his excitement, and makes it halfway across the room when he has to stop, backtrack to the desk, and swipe a sheet of loose-leaf paper from the countertop. Tony shoves it into his back pocket and darts up the stairs, three at a time.

Pepper's empty chair is waiting for him at the top of the stairs, and Tony nearly trips over it when its owner's voice rings out behind him.

"Hey boss."

Tony swears in surprise, turning to find Pepper seated on the elevated base of the decorative waterfall. She's beautiful in an emerald sweater, her manicured toes peeking out from the cuffs of her jeans. He meets her eyes. They both smile, his a grin and Pepper's a satisfied smirk.

"Did you do it yet?" he asks.

She shakes her head, and little teardrop earrings bat the sides of her face. When he opens his mouth to ask what he should do, she cuts him off by stretching her arms out toward him. Tony stares, realizes his mouth is open and closes it, swallows back a comment.

This is… this is it. He wipes his sweaty palms on his jeans, pauses before reaching out to grasp Pepper's hands in his.

His hands are warm and rough over hers, slick despite his best efforts. Pepper hangs on, holds her breath as he helps her rise to her feet.

Her muscles are sore, but there's none of the anticipated pain. Her muscles ache, feel like they're supporting five hundred pounds, but they do not hurt as she had expected them to. Tony's remedy has done its job more efficiently than she could imagine—if her doctor could see her now, standing on wobbly legs, they wouldn't believe it. They were suspicious to begin with, especially once they looked at Pepper's latest scan results and found the damaged nerves in her back to be completely healed. She is an anomaly on two feet, leaning into Tony's outstretched hands and shuffling forward like a toddler. She doesn't realize that she's been holding her breath until she becomes suddenly lightheaded, and inhales with a gasp.

Tony's grip on her fingers tightens. "Everything all right? Does it hurt?"

She shakes her head, nonetheless wincing as one knee almost gives out. It's like that dream she used to have, when she needs to get up the stairs but cannot put her weight on her legs. And that was _before_ the incident with Venom, before she wasted God knows how many minutes of her life waiting for the elevator. She'll never ignore the stairs again. Not ever.

She makes it about ten feet before she needs to stop. She announces as much, and Tony guides her over to the couch. Pepper collapses backwards onto it with a sigh, grinning despite her exhaustion. Her eyes are dry, but she feels as if she's been sobbing—her stomach aches with it, her chest tight. She looks up at Tony, with his thumbs shoved in his belt loops and his eyebrows aloft in anticipation, and realizes that he might be feeling the same thing.

"I can't believe that this is it," she says quietly. "When I was waking up in the hospital for the first time, and you told me what had happened, I never thought that I would get a second chance. But Tony, you did it! I'm… rehabilitated."

The word carries with it an implication that they both recognize, but Tony has shirked it long enough. "Yes, about that… I don't think you should leave."

"Why not, is something wrong?"

"Well, 'wrong' is kind of a relative thing—" he sighs. "Yes, something is wrong, Pepper. I've been thinking a lot, though this whole… experience. And I think it would make sense if you stay here. Live here." At the perplexed expression on her face, he adds, "Permanently, I mean."

Pepper's shoulders go square and rigid, and she leans back against her seat as if she were trying to put space between them. "You know I can't do that."

"Sure you can. You said it yourself when your crazy mom broke my window. You said this place is your home."

"I _can't_." Suddenly flushing and defensive, she feels as if he were pulling a long thread of yarn from her fist. There's a moment where she contemplates standing and trying to run, and another where she may have fallen so far into shock that she slipped from her body. "The company would suffer, PR would have a _fit_—"

Tony, half-smiling because he's more embarrassed than brave, shakes his head and says, "Ah, but you see, I am the company. It's got my name on it everywhere I could fit it."

"But the press—"

"Fuck the press, Pepper! Just—just pretend that, hypothetically, nobody expects anything of you. Pretend that there's no payroll, and definitely no press, and it's just us." At the extended pause, he sighs, "You've had a lot of excuses through the years, but not once has it been because you don't want to. What would you say in a perfect world?"

In a perfect world seems almost a dead phrase. Over the years she's learned again and again that no amount of womanpower the world to fit her figure. Changed or no, Tony Stark will ogle other women. He'll always miss deadlines in exchange for selfish playtime in his garage because that's who Tony is. In this metaphysical perfect world, he'd at least do her the courtesy of maintaining communication with her when he's overseas so that her entire body doesn't ache with fear. If everything fit into her leather-bound planner, she could agree to live with Tony right now and forget about his blotted past. It is, after all, the past, and his strange behavior over the last months could have come from nothing but extreme vigilance. She wants to forget his inconsideration, the hook-ups, the countless dresses she's dry cleaned, the fact that his sobriety streak is not apt to last without a program (and with his face all over the country, how could it ever be anonymous?).

However.

In that moment of defiance against her mother, upon returning to her office for the first time and sensing that gap, at the dinner table with Tony and Peter Parker while contemplating the meaning of loss, she had known already. It's a revelation she's been fighting long before she lost her motion and learned to live in reverse. Pepper looks up from her twisting and sees Tony, sees that the desperate undercurrent has finally risen to the forefront of his expression, and knows.

This place, Stark Manor, with its cold-designer interior and big, empty hallways, is her home. Tony Stark, with his stubborn tendency for self-destruction, is her home.

Pepper just looks. She shrugs, her shoulders heavy and her head shaking loosely from side to side, and says, "Yes. If it were really all that simple, then yes. But Tony—" She drops her chin to her chest, "what excuse could we possibly use? Since I've been like this, you've proved that you can do just as much as I can. I don't see how we could ever get away without it turning into a scandal. You barely need me anymore, much less living in your house."

There's a solid thud as Tony's knees connect to the floor, and he's taken her hands up by the time she processes the gesture. At first she thinks he might be proposing to her, and then that he might be _groveling_—the thought of Tony on his knees for anything is laughable—but then Pepper realizes that he's pressed something into her palm. She opens her hand. There lies a crumpled piece of notebook paper, folded into an inch-by-inch square. Baffled, Pepper asks what it is but opens it without waiting for an answer. When she has flattened out the creases over her thigh and held the paper high enough to read, she is almost overcome.

_I need you._

In four long columns down the length of the page, each labeled with a number from one to one hundred, is that phrase.

_01. I need you. 02. I need you. 03. I need you._

"You say it too much, Pepper," says Tony, but she's so busy gaping that she almost doesn't hear him. "This isn't for memorization, but you told me once to write it down a hundred times if I want to get my message across, so here you are."

Pepper tries admirably to think of some comeback. She manages a weak, "You…" but her throat has swollen and her words fail.

Tony presses forward, kneeling before her with his hands gripping the sides of her chair, looking sternly up at her face. "At the end of the day, you've always been there when everything else falls to shit. It's never been about the work, or the suit, and for once it's not even about me. Pepper, it's _you_."

Pepper has so many reasons to say no. She doesn't want to be the wimpy girlfriend who pines after and weeps while her superhero boyfriend saves the world (and besides, 'boyfriend' is such a juvenile term, isn't it?). She has a pretty high threshold for bullshit but none for messing around—Tony may think he can be monogamous, but 'till death do us part' can be a very, very long time. And as always, there is business. There's her job, there's payroll, and there's the media that would love to tear her image to pieces.

But for what might be the first time in Pepper's life, she does what feels easy. Smiling against the pricking at the corners of her eyes, she says, "Okay. We can try."

The moment that passes between them needs no words after the relieved laugh escapes from Tony's throat. On the floor of his living room, he gathers her hands and kisses them. The note faces up on her lap, each carefully-scribed sentence visible for them both. And when Tony, brimming with relief and joy, lets his forehead fall against her knees, Pepper can _feel_ it.

ooo


	9. Transposition

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Happy Reading!

* * *

_IX. Transposition_

Under the early morning sun, Pepper thinks she may be dying. It's not quite noon yet, the horizon still a bright blue line against the sea, but the thick air chokes her with every breath she heaves. The baking asphalt sends rippling mirages up the pathway, up her arms and legs, burning into her fiery hair. Pepper has experienced this nightmare before, but never quite like this—it's an odd throwback to the day that began it all, when she chased Tony down on his hunt for Venom and her four-inch heels drummed a beat into the pavement. That day had ended for her in pain even worse than this. Like then, on the day when her blood had blossomed across the sidewalk, Pepper is hot and rasping for air beneath the stabbing sting of her ribs. The difference is that now, three years later, her sneakers hit the road and Pepper keeps on running.

Hopefully today's soreness will yield a more pleasurable outcome.

Pepper drags her sweatband across her forehead and checks her pace. A week ago when the weatherman smilingly reported record heat for today's road race, Pepper had almost thrown her coffee mug at the television in her office. She had only ever trained in the heat, but running before sunrise was hard enough even with the average temperature hovering around "uncomfortable". Never mind an 11a.m. race under the scorching sun. Her lungs are ready to burst in their cage.

A whirring sound from behind catches her ear, and a moment later a golf cart zips up the road to meet her. Happy Hogan is at the wheel, unbothered by the heat in his suit and sunglasses. To his right, with his feet propped up on the mini dash and a clipboard in his lap, sits Tony.

"My dearest Pepper," Tony begins, and she lets out a preemptive groan of annoyance, "I know you said to wait at the finish line, but I wanted to be the first to personally congratulate you on breaking the second kilometer."

"Kill me," Pepper rasped.

"No time for that, Potts. I'm afraid you've got three more to go first! No, wait for it—" his eyes turn to the pedometer on the dashboard, "two point nine kilometers. Or twenty-nine hundred meters, whichever you prefer."

"I thought spectators weren't allowed on the roads."

"Well it's my race, so I'm more of a supervisor. In fact, I was just checking for pot holes, actually. Completely coincidental that I should happen into you here, of all places!"

"Am I in last place?" says Pepper.

"Technically not—the tail end of the golf cart's about two feet behind you."

"Hilarious."

Pepper doesn't mind being last, but she'd sort of hoped that—given Tony had insisted on putting her name all over this 5k benefit run—she might be able to offer a bit more competition. But no matter. Now that the burning of lactic acid has crept its way up her shins and into the spaces between her ribs, Pepper's glad that it's a no-pressure scenario. Were it an aggressive race, she might need a lot more than congratulations at the finish line (an ambulance, namely).

Completely disregarding Pepper's huffing and puffing, Tony casually taps a finger against the clipboard propped up on his knee.

"Hey, listen, once this shindig's all wrapped up, you've got an interview with Malibu Surfside. And then after that it's just an hour jet ride and we're gone for the week. But don't worry; the cruise ship's got a track on the upper level."

The look that Pepper shoots him only tugs his smile broader. She asks if he's got any water, and behold, he does. Tony pulls a bottle out from the space between him and Happy, twists off the cap, and hands it across the space. Pepper takes a sip and pours the rest over her head. When she hands it back Tony stands up, grasping the bar tight in one hand, and leans over to kiss her damp cheek.

"Will that be all, Miss Potts?" he murmurs, right into her ear.

She presses the empty water bottle into his free hand and sets her eyes on the road ahead. Her flushed face and ragged breathing indicate a vicious fight, her ponytail marking each footfall with a sharp slap against her neck. It's the smile that gives her away.

"That will be all, Mr. Stark."

"Remember: in through your nose, out through your mouth. Only two point two-five-three-eight more and you're free!"

"Please go away."

Tony spares her one last look before he gives the word to Happy, and the cart goes zooming off along the path. Pepper watches it go, watches until it turns the corner and the dust settles back down. Tony says that he's only been planning this cruise to an unidentified location for a few days, but she first raised a brow two months ago when paperwork from the Virgin Islands came across her fax machine by accident. And just three days later, when balancing their personal budget she discovered the purchase of an alarmingly expensive diamond ring (fair trade, platinum band, just her size). Old habits—the occupational hazard of dating your personal assistant. She admires his efforts at independence, if nothing else. And anyhow, she's seen this moment coming for a very long time.

Since the day Tony sank down to his knees and pleaded that she stay with him, their relationship has been a work in progress. Like all couples they've had to work on gaining equal grounds in decision-making and communication. Pepper never wanted to be the tearful house-ridden girlfriend who paces and weeps until her lover's safe return. So after some serious talking, Tony gave her an outlet from which to funnel her anxiety into something tangible and productive—he designed a system in the mansion so that they could communicate live on missions. Pepper sees what Tony sees, feeds him reports from the area, keeps his vitals on her blackberry so that even when she's not home, she can know that he's alive and safe.

The road runs both ways. Now that Pepper has seen the staggering reality of his work, her nightmares have become more vivid but manageable. Tony in turn has a dependable someone who understands his drive and experiences. The burden, then, is shared like a bad memory between them. Not as hero and assistant, but as equals. As partners. Pepper believes that this above all else is what helps him keep sober when he'd much rather get drunk and forget.

Up ahead, Pepper can see the 3-kilometer mark. She knows that she can make it. She knows that _they_, for all of their flaws and fears, are going to make it. Pepper straightens up, loosens her shoulders, lifts her knees and marvels at the strength of her pounding feet. This is how she knows. When the world seems hopeless and despair beckons them closer, she has proof that there is reason to hang on.

Which is why, when tonight Tony drops to one knee and offers up his heart forever, Pepper will know exactly what to say.

o

"_Love is a better teacher than a sense of duty"_ – Albert Einstein

o

_Fin._


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